On this day in physics: 13 March 1899- Happy Birthday to John Hasbrouck Van Vleck who would have turned 117 today. He was one of the winners of the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his contributions understanding the behavior of electrons in magnetic solids. He was also one of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb during The Second World War.
Word of the Day- Schrodinger's Cat is a story or metaphor devised by Erwin Schrodinger to describe the superposition of states a quantum particle can exist in before measurement. In this scenario there is a cat in a box which can release poison by pressing a button. Until the observer opens the box to take stock of the cat's state, it is impossible to know whether it is alive or dead. It is from this experiment that the very paradoxical idea that the cat is in a superposition of being both alive and dead comes from. It's to describe the idea of quantum entanglement.
Quote of the Day: "We spend the first years of our children's lives teaching them how to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to sit down and shut up.” -Neil Degrasse Tyson
Keywords: Schrodinger, Cat, Quantum Mechanics, Superposition
