As Google's usual way of paying tribute to special events and memorable people through their Google Doodles, the Google homepage this time features the popular Austrian physicist, Erwin Schrodinger. If Mr Schrodinger is still alive today, he would have been 126 years old.

What Is Schrodinger's Cat About?

Mr Schrodinger was a Nobel Prize winner who was famed for his experiment called Schrodinger's Cat which is seen in the Google homepage.

Google Doodles

The experiment is a huge scale interpretation of the concept of quantum mechanics. Its theory describes a cat placed inside a box that has a poison vial. Right outside of the box is a Geiger counter plus a source for radioactivity. A certain mechanism is set up in the box which will be the one to break the vial just in case the Geiger counter sees a decayed atom from the radioactive element after a given amount of time.

And since there is no way that the decay can be predicted, then one will never know if the cat is still alive or dead, unless the box will be opened. Hence, from the quantum mechanics idea, the cat is both dead and alive, since the atom has both decayed and not decayed.

In short, Erwin Schrodinger's illustration has helped unravel the strangeness of quantum mechanics and also make the Copenhagen interpretation a lot more specific. The system interprets that the superposition of states are halted once they are observed.

Who is Erwin Schrodinger?

Mr Schrodinger spent much of his career in Germany where he focused on the theory of quantum mechanics. It was in 1925 that he developed the Schrodinger's equation which got him his 1933 Nobel Prize.

Mr Schrodinger's equation defines how the quantum condition of various physical states can change through time. It had huge effects on how other researchers studied quantum mechanics.

He left Germany in 1933 with the Nazis coming in for power and he landed at the University of Oxford. He lectured about physics at numerous institutions for the rest of his years. He died on January 4, 1961.

As Google Doodles remembers Erwin Schrodinger, everyone is still not sure whether the cat is dead or alive.