In honor of tonight's episode of CBS's The Big Bang Theory, I'd like to highlight our new feature on the topic of the Schroedinger's cat thought experiment, which played a pivotal role in the climax of the episode (and possibly the season, since this may have been the season finale).

Developed in 1935 by quantum physics pioneer Erwin Schroedinger, this example of extending microscopic principles into the macroscopic world illuminates some of the more curious features of quantum physics.

• May 24, 1686 - German physicist and engineer Gabriel Fahrenheit is born. Fahrenheit developed precise thermometers, including those made with mercury. The temperature scale that he created, named the Fahrenheit scale, was used for centuries as the primary temperature scale until the creation of the Celsius scale.
• May 25, 1865 - Dutch physicist Pieter Zeeman is born. Zeeman received the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the Zeeman effect, in which a static magnetic field causes spectral lines to split into several components (the related Stark effect demonstrates a similar outcome in an electric field) . This effect has significant applications in the field of spectroscopy, including the medical diagnostic scanning tool magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
• May 20, 1947 - Austrian physicist Phillipp Lenard dies. Lenard won the 1905 Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on cathode rays and the discovery of their properties.
• May 23, 1908 - American physicist and electrical engineer John Bardeen is born. Bardeen is the only person to have received two Nobel Prizes in Physics. His first, in 1956, was for building the first practical transistor. His second, in 1972, was for his work in developing the BCS (Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer) theory of conventional superconductivity.
• May 25, 1921 - German-American physicist Jack Steinberger is born. Steinberger received the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics for creation of a neutrino beam through a multistep process in a particle accelerator.
• May 25, 1961 - American president John F. Kennedy announces his goal to put "a man on the moon" before the end of the decade. This announcement was the effective start of the Apollo program.
• May 21, 1964 - German-born physicist James Franck dies. Franck received the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in the Franck-Hertz experiment, which helped to confirm the basic validity of the Bohr model of the atom, developed in 1913 by physicist Niels Bohr as one of the crucial early applications of quantum physics.
• May 25, 1977 - George Lucas' film Star Wars is released in theaters, ushering in the age of special-effects laden science fiction films. The most significant physics reference in Star Wars is actually an error. When Luke Skywalker & Ben Kenobi meet Han Solo & Chewbacca in the Mos Eisley cantina, Han proudly proclaims that his ship, the Millenium Falcon, completed the "Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs." A parsec, however, is a unit of distance rather than time. In later novels in the Star Wars "expanded universe," notably the Jedi Academy Trilogy of novels, it is explained that the Kessel Run involves maneuvering through a dense cluster of black holes ("the Maw Cluster") that can be dangerous if ships get too close, requiring most pilots to circumvent the Cluster. According to this explanation, therefore, Han was actually bragging about his ship's maneuverability and his own ability to pilot through the difficult gravitational fields of the Maw Cluster, rather than his ship's speed.