Re Belfast's Friday night post
"According to James D. Watson's memoir, DNA, the Secret of Life, Schrödinger's book gave Watson the inspiration to research the gene, which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix structure in 1953. Similarly, Francis Crick, in his autobiographical book What Mad Pursuit, described how he was influenced by Schrödinger's speculations about how genetic information might be stored in molecules." _ I can't quote a quote, sorry!
In a no Hitler TL, Schrödinger probably won't take a post in Dublin -unless he fancies a couple of years living in a foreign capital. But he should still write the book and will attend a whole raft of international conferences nd symposia that WW2 disrupted OTL. So he will probably still inspire Crick and Watson and this TL they may get to meet him personally as a visiting lecturer
The book was based on talks he gave to the public as part of his job working for the institute for advanced studies Dublin was to promote a wide interest and understanding of the sciences in Ireland.
Looks like Schrödinger will need to give the talks some where else.
a bigger problem is De Valera who hired him and setup the institute for advanced studies is dead ITL.
One of the stories I heard why he came to Dublin was he was a lady's man and his habit of living with 2 mistress made it hard for him to find a permanent position.
It would definitely have appealed to the likes of Schrodinger, who scandalously brought both a wife and mistress with him to Dublin, after Dev pulled out all the stops to get him here, and who still had plenty of loving left over for the local women.
It wasn’t their happiness Schrodinger was interested in – on the contrary, he acknowledged the widespread “distress” his philandering caused. But for all his conservatism, de Valera was happy to look the other way.
When another potential DIAS recruit, Paul Dirac, came to a conference in Dublin, the taoiseach went so far as to treat him and his wife to a “joyride around the local countryside” (that’s the phrase used by Dirac’s biographer, who presumably didn’t mean they were driving recklessly in a stolen car).
The maidens, comely or otherwise, may not have been a carrot in that case. Actual carrots might have worked, though. Tempting the couple to join him, Schrodinger boasted of wartime Ireland’s other attractions in a letter to Dirac’s wife: “There is plenty of food here – ham, butter, eggs, cakes, as much as one wants.”
DIAS was an extraordinary idea, really – comprising only two schools, one devoted to “Celtic Studies”, the other “Cosmic Physics”. As Neasa McGarrigle wrote on our science page yesterday, this reflected de Valera’s twin obsessions, “Irish and maths”. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the institute spoke in a gutteral language while looking at the stars.
And it lends curious light to a detail I learned only recently – that among Schrodinger’s love affairs there was one with the wife of a leading Irish language scholar. They even had a child together, who, when the lovers split, was raised by the woman’s estranged husband.
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/...blin-institute-for-advanced-studies-1.2393548
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