Worth Reading: Good News in History, January 27 | A Sign of Progress

Worth Reading: Good News in History, January 27 | A Sign of Progress

Why this story matters: While it may not dominate headlines, this story reflects meaningful change in action. Quick summary: This story highlights recent developments related to on this day, showing how constructive action can lead to meaningful results. 100 years ago, Erwin Schrödinger published his theory of wave mechanics, a significant landmark in the development of quantum theory that won him the Nobel Prize. Raised in Austria, but Irish after emigration, the physicist’s theory is known as the Schrödinger equation, and provided a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time—the quantum counterpart of Newton’s second law in classical mechanics. See the equation on his tombstone below. (1926) Schrödinger’s gravestone: Victor Blacus, CC license He was the author of many works on various aspects of physics and made several attempts to construct a unified field theory. He is also known for his Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, whereby two poss…