He proposed a thought experiment in 1935 in which a cat was simultaneously alive and dead. Erwin Schrodinger meant it as a critique of quantum mechanics, not a celebration of it — he thought the Copenhagen interpretation led to absurdities. The cat became the most famous thought experiment in physics. He won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for the wave equation that bears his name, left Austria after the Anschluss, spent years at Oxford and Dublin, and wrote What Is Life?, a book that influenced the discovery of DNA. He died in Vienna in 1961 at 73.
January 4, 1961
65 years ago
What Else Happened on January 4
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