• Lifehacker, Wednesday, December 19, 2012 4:23 PM

A smart inbox set up to only display messages that reside in the main inbox and that are also unread behaves in a sort of Schrödinger state. The messages cease to exist in the smart inbox if they are read and not acted on, compelling inbox owners to deal with them immediately instead of letting them pile up. Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist best remembered for his work in quantum physics, and his thought experiment entitled Schrödinger's Cat, which was about how an object may exist in two states simultaneously. 

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