Thursday, August 22, 2013

Claude Debussy's 151st Birthday

Today, Google celebrates the 151st birthday of Achille-Claude Debussy, a prominent French composer who played a vital role in the Western music's transition to the modern era, with a motion picture clip of a riverside scenery and one of his most popular piece, Clair de Lune, playing in the background.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Happy Chinese Valentine's Day 2013

Now here's an interactive app doodle made by Google to celebrate a Chinese festival called Qixi Festival.

The origins of this celebration, which falls on the seventh day of the 7th lunar month, is from a mythical folktale about two lovers, the cowherd and weaver girl, whose love was not meant to be and were banished to opposite sides of the Universe only to meet once a year via a bridge formed by a flock of magpies.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Erwin Schrödinger's 126th Birthday

Today's Google doodle features two drawings of presumably the same cat, alive and well coming out from one side of a box and being in spirit form or rather dead flying out from the other side of the box. And if we top this up with the scribbling of what seems to be some mathematical equation into the doodle, then there can be only one thing that comes into mind...

Yup, the infamously "cruel" (I'm joking here of course) thought experiment of Erwin Schrödinger (Schrödinger's cat).

So needless to say, this doodle is made to celebrate the 126th birthday of Erwin Schrödinger, a world renown Austrian physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in the field of quantum theory, which ultimately formed the basis of wave mechanics.

But despite being only largely known for his contributions in the quantum field, he does have many works in various other fields of physics, in philosophy and in theoretical biology as well, so he's quite the heck of a guy in my opinion.