Google pays tribute to Schrödinger and his cat with latest doodle

Google has honoured Nobel Prize-winning Quantum Physicist Erwin Schrödinger in a doodle today. Schrödinger would have turned 126 today and is best known for propounding the experiment called Schrödinger’s Cat. Naturally, today’s Google Doodle pays tribute to the famous experiment.

The doodle shows the paradoxical thought experiment devised by Schrödinger’s in 1935, but in a playful manner. The famous equation is best explained by using the example of a cat in a box, which also contains a vial filled with poison, which may or may not be triggered due to atom decay. So without opening the box, at any given point, one could say that the cat is both alive and dead. Both the “O”s in Google’s doodle today have been replaced by the box. Fittingly, there is a live cat coming out of it as well as the cat’s soul floating out.

Google honours Schrödinger

Schrödinger was born in Vienna in 1887 and was home schooled as a child. He went on to study theoretical physics at the University of Vienna and chose to take up voluntary military service. He came back to study experimental physics. While teaching physics at the University of Zurich, he formulated a wave-equation that ended up accurately showing the energy level of atoms. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this equation in 1933. Schrödinger also worked in the field of dielectrics, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, colour theory, general relativity, electrodynamics and even cosmology.

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