 Visitors to Dublin #2:
Erwin Schrödinger
Erwin Schrödinger, the only physicist best remembered for his cat, was already an established figure when he came to make Dublin his home. Born in Vienna in 1887, an illustrious career had seen the discovery of his famous wave equation in 1926, followed by a Nobel Prize in 1933.
But 1933 was to be no time of celebration. Concerned at Hitler's coming to power Schrödinger fled for England, before returning to Austria to the University of Graz. Bad move! With the annexation of Austria in 1938 Schrödinger was dismissed from his post for "political unreliability". Again he fled with his wife and contacted the President of the League of Nations - Ireland's Eamon De Valera. Dev, never a man to miss an opportunity, offered him a post in the new Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) that he was trying to set up in Merrion Square.
So Schrödinger moved to Dublin in September 1939, as the first Director of the School of Theoretical Physics, accompanied by his wife and daughter. While here he continued his work on electromagnetic theory and relativity and corresponded with Einstein on a unified field theory until they fell out over the direction it was taking. He also published What Is Life? (1944), a ground-breaking tract on biology and Nature and the Greeks (1954), a study of Greek science and philosophy.
While in Dublin, Schrödinger fathered two more daughters by two different Irish women. In 1956 he retired and returned to his beloved Vienna with his wife Anny, where he died in 1961.
Visitors to Dublin: George Frederic Handel
Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
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