Trinity College sits in the heart of Dublin, its gray, three-story, neoclassical buildings positioned around lawns and playing fields. At the eastern end of the campus is another gray building, built in 1905 in a rather different style. This is the Fitzgerald Building, or the Physical Laboratory as it is called in deeply engraved letters on the stone lintel. On the top floor is a lecture theater, and in the late afternoon of the first Friday of February 1943, around 400 people crowded onto the varnished wooden benches.
According to Time magazine, among those lucky enough to get a seat were “Cabinet ministers, diplomats, scholars and socialites,” as well as the Irish prime minister, Éamon de Valera. They were there to hear the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger give a lecture with the intriguing title “What Is Life?” The interest was so great that scores of people were turned away, and the lecture had to be repeated the following Monday.
Schrödinger arrived in Dublin after fleeing the Nazis — he had been working at Graz University in Austria when the Germans took over in 1938. Although he had a reputation as an opponent of Hitler, Schrödinger published an accommodating letter about the Nazi takeover, with the hope of being left alone. This tactic failed, and he had to flee the country in a hurry, leaving his gold Nobel medal behind. De Valera, who was interested in physics, offered Schrödinger a post in Dublin’s new Institute for Advanced Studies. And so the master of quantum mechanics found himself in Ireland.
On three consecutive Fridays, 56-year-old Schrödinger walked into the Fitzgerald Building lecture theater to give his talks, in which he explored the relationship between quantum physics and recent discoveries in biology.
