Post by auntym on Aug 12, 2013 11:31:06 GMT -6
newsfeed.time.com/2013/08/12/google-doodle-celebrates-physicist-erwin-schrodinger-and-cats/
Google Doodle Celebrates Physicist Erwin Schrödinger … and Cats!
The Austrian physicist was born 126 years ago today
By Olivia B. Waxman @obwax Aug. 12, 2013
Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the life of Austrian physicist and Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger (August 12, 1887 — January 4, 1961), a founder of quantum physics who used cats to explain things long before Internet cat videos became cool.
Science & Society Picture / Getty Images
AUSTRIA – AUGUST 28: Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) founded wave mechanics, creating Schrodinger’s equation.
The cats in the Google Doodle illustrate his famous thought experiment known as “Schrödinger’s Cat,” proposed to help explain quantum mechanics. As TIME sums up the theory:
Put a cat in a box, he proposed, and rig up a Rube Goldberg contraption involving a hammer, a vial of poison and a quantum triggering device. If an electron is in one position, the hammer will remain safely cocked. But if the electron moves into the opposite location, the hammer will drop, smashing the vial and killing the cat.
The laws of quantum mechanics hold that as long as the electron remains undisturbed, it hangs in limbo, occupying both its possible states. The cat, by extension, is both dead and alive.
This animated cat video also explains everything you need to know in under two minutes:
A native of Vienna, Austria, who worked for a brief time alongside Albert Einstein, Schrödinger also developed what is called Schrödinger’s wave equation — an important discovery in the field of wave mechanics for which he shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with British physicist P.A.M. Dirac. In a 1933 article about the prizewinners, TIME wrote that Schrödinger expanded the field of subatomic study:
“He replaced the classical equations for electron motion with new differential equations similar to those which describe the wave motion which constitutes light and sound. Thus the atom is conceived as a positive nucleus wrapped in a throbbing field of negative electricity.”
CONTINUE READING: newsfeed.time.com/2013/08/12/google-doodle-celebrates-physicist-erwin-schrodinger-and-cats/#ixzz2bmIi7gWF
www.google.com/
Google Doodle Celebrates Physicist Erwin Schrödinger … and Cats!
The Austrian physicist was born 126 years ago today
By Olivia B. Waxman @obwax Aug. 12, 2013
Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the life of Austrian physicist and Nobel Prize winner Erwin Schrödinger (August 12, 1887 — January 4, 1961), a founder of quantum physics who used cats to explain things long before Internet cat videos became cool.
Science & Society Picture / Getty Images
AUSTRIA – AUGUST 28: Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) founded wave mechanics, creating Schrodinger’s equation.
The cats in the Google Doodle illustrate his famous thought experiment known as “Schrödinger’s Cat,” proposed to help explain quantum mechanics. As TIME sums up the theory:
Put a cat in a box, he proposed, and rig up a Rube Goldberg contraption involving a hammer, a vial of poison and a quantum triggering device. If an electron is in one position, the hammer will remain safely cocked. But if the electron moves into the opposite location, the hammer will drop, smashing the vial and killing the cat.
The laws of quantum mechanics hold that as long as the electron remains undisturbed, it hangs in limbo, occupying both its possible states. The cat, by extension, is both dead and alive.
This animated cat video also explains everything you need to know in under two minutes:
A native of Vienna, Austria, who worked for a brief time alongside Albert Einstein, Schrödinger also developed what is called Schrödinger’s wave equation — an important discovery in the field of wave mechanics for which he shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with British physicist P.A.M. Dirac. In a 1933 article about the prizewinners, TIME wrote that Schrödinger expanded the field of subatomic study:
“He replaced the classical equations for electron motion with new differential equations similar to those which describe the wave motion which constitutes light and sound. Thus the atom is conceived as a positive nucleus wrapped in a throbbing field of negative electricity.”
CONTINUE READING: newsfeed.time.com/2013/08/12/google-doodle-celebrates-physicist-erwin-schrodinger-and-cats/#ixzz2bmIi7gWF
www.google.com/