Google is honoring Erwin Schrödinger's birth and his feline paradox thought experiment by creating a cat-themed doodle.
Schrödinger's famous experiment became a "pop culture staple," according to National Geographic. However, it was his Nobel prize-winning work with quantum mechanics that created a legacy in the world of physics.
The findings of Schrödinger's cat experiment simply suggest until one opens a box, the feline's state is unknown, leaving one to simultaneously believe it may be alive or dead until proven otherwise.
Eric Martell, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Millikin University, told National Geographic Schrödinger developed the paradox "to illustrate a point in quantum mechanics about the nature of wave particles."
"What we discovered in the late 1800s and early 1900s is that really, really tiny things didn't obey Newton's Laws," Martell said. "So the rules that we used to govern the motion of a ball or person or car couldn't be used to explain how an electron or atom works."
National Geographic gave the following synopsis of his legendary experiment:
A cat is placed in a steel box along with a Geiger counter, a vial of poison, a hammer, and a radioactive substance. When the radioactive substance decays, the Geiger detects it and triggers the hammer to release the poison, which subsequently kills the cat. The radioactive decay is a random process, and there is no way to predict when it will happen. Physicists say the atom exists in a state known as a superposition-both decayed and not decayed at the same time.
Until the box is opened, an observer doesn't know whether the cat is alive or dead-because the cat's fate is intrinsically tied to whether or not the atom has decayed and the cat would, as Schrödinger put it, be "living and dead ... in equal parts" until it is observed.
Click here to read the full National Geographic tribute to Erwin Schrödinger.
