Zee Media Bureau/Liji Varghese
New Delhi: Google on Monday celebrated the 126th birth anniversary of Erwin Schrödinger, the Nobel prize-winning quantum physicist whose eponymous equation lies at the heart of quantum mechanics, with a doodle on its homepage.
The doodle depicts Schrodinger`s cat, his famous quantum mechanics equation, with the image of a cat and symbols portraying the equation.
Schrödinger`s cat a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, was devised by the physicist in 1935.
Born on 12 August 1887, Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, was an Austrian physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in the field of quantum theory, which formed the basis of wave mechanics: he formulated the wave equation and revealed the identity of his development of the formalism and matrix mechanics.
Tutored at home as a child, Schrödinger went on to study theoretical physics at the University of Vienna before undertaking voluntary military service, later returning to academia to study experimental physics.
By 1925, then a professor of physics at the University of Zurich and holidaying in the Alps, Schrödinger formulated a wave-equation that accurately gave the energy levels of atoms. In 1933 Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize for Physics for the formulation of the Schrödinger equation.
Schrödinger’s other works focused on different fields of physics, including statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, physics of dielectrics, colour theory, electrodynamics, general relativity, and cosmology.
In his book ‘What Is Life?’, Schrödinger addressed the problems of genetics, taking a close look at the phenomenon of life from the point of view of physics.
He died in Vienna in January 1961 from the tuberculosis.
