What’s up with today’s Google doodle? We’re used to sometimes crazy, always creative doodles from the company, celebrating some or other important day or person, but this one seems particularly abstract.

Today is the 155th birthday of Heinrich Hertz, the German physicist whose experiments with electromagnetic waves led to the development of the wireless telegraph and the radio.

You’re more likely to recognise the name in relation to standard units of frequency used to identify radio signals and in your computer’s CPU- in fact any processor we use in modern electronic technology, from phones to computers to tablets, has a “heartbeat” that we express in Hertz.

The unit was established by the scientific community in 1930, 36 years after his death. His discovery, that electro-magnetic emissions behave like waves and travel over distance, ultimately laid the foundations for the radios and TV-sets we know today.

If you want to know more about Hertz, head on over to Google and click on the doodle.

[Source: Mashable, Guardian]