Hamilton

I recollect in or about 1955 watching the unveiling by Eamonn de Valera of a plaque erected to commemorate the discovery of quaternions by Sir William Rowan Hamilton. The plaque was located at Brougham Bridge over the Royal Canal, now known as Hamilton Bridge on the Broomebridge Road. It is at eye level on the north bank as seen from the tow-path, just about where Hamilton would have made the legendary incisions with his knife on October 16 1843 after his flash of creative insight.

The occasion must have been the 150th anniversary of his birth, a brave effort to whip up public interest in that bleak decade. I don't remember what Dev said, but I do remember at the time reflecting on the cultural gap between Hamilton, one of the giants of 19th-century scientific culture, world-renowned in his day, and to this day wherever mathematics is studied in any depth, and the depressed, obscurantist environment of the 50s over which Dev presided. It is to Dev's credit that he glimpsed the significance of Hamilton in the Irish pantheon, although he had little or no grasp of his practical significance.

(He similarly half-understood the importance of taking in the European anti-Fascist refugee scientists in the 40s, for whom he founded the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. Dev was subsequently awarded and FRS for this, in a period of political rapprochement with the British. If he had fully understood the process, he would have linked the Institute of Advanced Studies into the academic system, using it to bridge the TCD and UCD postgraduate schools of physics, then subdivided on the basis of religious apartheid. But I digress.)

Had the book under review been part of the Irish cultural equipment earlier in the nation-building process, and had it been produced by an Irish scientific historian as a step towards the understanding of the Irish contribution to the world scientific culture as it developed in the 19th century, perhaps Dev's remarks on Hamilton would have been made from a position of greater achievement. Better late than never; competent American scholarship again comes to the rescue to fill the gaps left by our own academics, who are in sore need of some leadership in the fruitful field provided by the history of science in Ireland, and its interactions with technology and society.

To whom is Hamilton important, and for what reasons? There is contemporary relevance in that in Irish politics there has surfaced the concept of the Republic as it might have been had it emerged successfully under the leadership of Thomas Davis(1). Hamilton was on socialising terms with Oscar Wilde's mother, who contributed to the 'Nation' under the pseudonym 'Speranza'; the common ground was poetry in the romantic tradition, which they both wrote, badly. He was also on close terms with Smith O'Brien(2); in their youth they had cavorted together on the Dunraven estate at Adare, later they had occasion to interact politically in the reforming of the Constitution of the Royal Irish Academy. Hamilton was consciously patriotic in his fostering of the Academy as a centre for Irish scientific publication, and always regarded himself as Irish when being lionised abroad. Yet he was high-Tory unionist in politics, and of the Established Church, within which he espoused the Puseyite cause, though when some of his friends of that persuasion followed Newman into the Roman Catholic Church he broke with them. There was Puseyite influence behind the founding of St Columba's College by Dunraven and others, for the purpose of teaching Irish to the sons of those landlord who after the Act on Union had elected to stay in Ireland to improve their estates. The threads of Davis's Republic had it emerged would have had a complex weave.

Hamilton was a friend of Coleridge; there were similarities in their philosophical and emotional characters: closeness to sisters, romantic unrequited loves. The complexity of this aspect of Hamilton's character makes his biography of interest to non-scientists, who may along the way pick up some insights into the working of the creative scientific mind. Scientists will get some insights into his philosophy and his romanticism.

In a short review, to convey to a lay reader some measure of Hamilton's stature in the world scientific pantheon is going to require shorthand; scientific historians therefore please forgive me for some oversimplification.

Hamilton created an elegant mathematical system which described the whole basis of geometrical optics and Newtonian dynamics with a unified theoretical structure. With this he was able to predict new optical phenomena in non-isotropic crystals, which the experimentalists of the day went on to discover. This was a sensational triumph for the science of the day; it won Hamilton world fame. (He was, by the way, the first foreign member of the US Academy of Sciences.) This Hamilton formalism was at the root of the development by Einstein of the relativity theory, and by Schroedinger of the quantum theory; it underlies the wave-particle duality of the latter, though Hamilton was only aware of this problem in its primitive form (Newton's corpuscles versus the Young-Fresnel wave theory of light).

Hamilton was Astronomer Royal for Ireland and lived at Dunsink Observatory. His theoretical work had impact on telescope design, although this aspect never excited him. The philosophy and theory were all, implementation nothing. So there is no record of his interacting with the Earl of Rosse, who set out at Parsonstown to take the witchcraft out of telescope design in the 1840s, and succeeded, using local craftsmen, and optical theory which by Hamilton's standards was kindergarten stuff. Yet they were on familiar terms and socialised together. Hamilton's scientific philosophy stopped short of technology, unlike the Earl, who had direct exposure to technology via the British military system, which his family went on to service with the technological spin-off from the great Parsonstown telescope(3).

Hamiltons best-known (at least by name) contribution to mathematics was the theory of 'quaternions'. Few now know what they are. Dev did (just about). Their significance is that they constituted the first invented algebraic system, other than formalised arithmetic. They describe elegantly a four-dimensional space, although Einstein chose not to use them, as better formalism was subsequently developed by Reimann. Vector analysis is a special case of quaternions; if you take two quaternions with their 'real parts' zero (these look like vectors) and multiply them by quaternion rules, you get both vector and scalar products in the quaternion product, the scalar being the real part. (Quaternions are hyper-complex numbers, with one real and three imaginary parts). Unfortunately however vector analysis took off on its own, with much less theoretical elegance, and became the work-horse of the engineers, while quaternions, in which vector analysis is embedded, remains a background curiosity.

Hamilton spent the last years of his life trying to write a 'user-manual' for quaternions, but never succeeded, mostly because he kept chasing philosophical hares instead of building a workshop. Despite some popularising work by others, notably Tait, quaternions remain in the backwater of mathematics, although their pioneering theoretical significance was enormous, as they opened up the whole field now occupied by linear associative algebras.

Hamilton believed that all discovery was by mental effort alone, without interaction with the physical world, as did the Greek idealists. If his constructs happened to fit the world, it was because God had made his mind and endowed it with insights, as well as making the world, an additional proof of the existence of God, if one were needed. This comfortable philosophy appeared to work for optics and dynamics, but (it could be argued) broke down for quaternions. Perhaps the fact that in his early years he was a working astronomer helped to bring together his creative concepts with physical reality. In later life he left the observatory to assistants and withdrew into his mathematical studies.

Philosophers of science, historians, scientists, mathematicians, teachers and lay readers will all find something in this book to interest them. I can thoroughly recommend it.

Notes to the Hamilton review:

2. William Smith O'Brien, an improving landlord, led an abortive uprising in 1848.

3. The Parsons turbine and the Grubb-Parsons optical works were technological spin-offs of the Parsonstown telescope. Both were important suppliers of advanced technology to the Royal Navy.

Tyndall

Science, Technology and Renewal

The present disastrous state of Ireland has spawned endless analysis and introspection but little effective synthesis. Reasons for this are suggested by Kelleher, who blames the the English gentleman-amateur tradition in science (divorcing it from engineering) and the corresponding tradition in the Civil Service, rooted in rote-learning of the classics. There are signs however that some of our more active intellectuals are beginning to understand the need for prescriptive synthesis, and even the need to give the prescriptions an active political dimension, so as to make them happen. Thus in the Kennedy compilation, while much of the space is devoted to reiterations of statements of the problem by various authors, two authors (Gearoid O Tuathaigh and Joe Lee) come down decisively on the side of a change in the State structure, in the form of regional governments, with all sectoral functions integrated at regional level, under the general co- ordination of a lean national government. Connell Fanning develops some of the working details of this concept in the Cork context.

Ireland in Transition is the fruit of a series of Thomas Davis Lectures, broadcast by RTE during 1985 to mark the 25th anniversary of the foundation of the Economic and Social Research Institute. There is an introduction by Patrick Lynch (who is the ESRI Chairman),in which he castigates Professor Oliver MacDonagh for his narrow view of Thomas Davis, reminding us that the latter was no mere Germanophile romantic, but took an active interest in modern technology, extolling the work of Sir Robert Kane as the means of laying the economic basis for an independent Irish nation. Davis, in fact, attended the Cork meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1843, and picked up some hints of the possibility of photographic reproduction in newspapers. The present writer drew attention to this link in the Crane Bag article referred to by Kelleher. Indeed the founders of the idea of Ireland as a modern European nation-state were alive to the possibilities of technology for national liberation, and this was the main point I made in the Crane Bag article, to which the Kelleher pamphlet is a sequel. This awareness however got lost during the latter half of the 19th century; it remains to be effectively rediscovered.

Contributors to Ireland in Transition include TK Whitaker, who gives an overview 1958-85, Dermot McAleese (world economy), JJ Sexton (employment and emigration), Kieran Kennedy (Industry: the Revolution Unfinished) and Robert O'Connor (Agriculture and Other Natural Resources). Other topics covered include government (growth of, Brendan Walsh), living standards (Peter Cassels), class, crime, social mobility, industrial relations, the Church, politics.

Some quotes are appropriate, both from analysis and prescription: '...the lack of organisational capacity which causes us to pay 100s of millions of pounds in unemployment relief in a country still poorly provided with basic amenities but rich in dilapidation...' (Whitaker); '...As the economy grew in prosperity, it was not surprising that Irish firms should look abroad for investment opportunities.....the Irish multinational is very much alive and well...' (McAleese); '...the use of foreign technology was a poor substitute for training these talents at home... Ireland was exporting expensively-trained scientists, engineers and technicians...' ( Kennedy).

Gearoid O Tuathaigh puts his finger on the weakness of regional economic development as it evolved after the de facto rejection of the Buchanan approach in the 60s: the IDA foreign-owned production unit, parachuted into a remote location in response to political pressure, with marginal seats in mind. Such units depend on marketing and R&D done elsewhere, usually abroad. Manufacturing is decreasing in importance as a job-generator; the jobs come with the associated services. These tend to be at the decision-centres.

In the Republic there is only one decision-centre, Dublin. If you want regional development, you have to provide for regional decision-centres. Joe Lee on this topic shows quotable acerbity: '...what we have is centralisation without cohesion... if the centralisers hold the locals to be unfit for self-government, the performance of centralised government has scarcely sufficed to silence the sceptics who hold the Irish to be unfit for self-government...'. He goes on to compare us unfavourable with other small fringe-European nation-states: '...we are unique... in having abandoned our language, reputedly to sell the cow... other small states, who lacked the imagination to take so apparently progressive a step as jettisoning their obscure languages, have sold the cow distinctly more successfully than ourselves... we bartered the language, but we could not even get a proper mess of pottage for it... our unusual feat of losing on the cultural swings and losing on the economic roundabouts... we have failed to develop a serious tradition of native social thought... we have imitated much but learned little...'.

It is good to see some constructive anger emerging among those who aspire to lead the formation of public opinion, and to see the hint of a focus emerging. This focus, which can perhaps be labelled 'decentralist national democratic reform', is sharpened by Connell Fannings regional analysis of the Cork redevelopment problem.

Fanning dismisses Cork's claim that it is somehow a 'special case' arising out of the Dunlop, Ford and Verolme closures, and makes the case that Cork can pilot a redevelopment policy applicable to the whole of Ireland, based on giving priority attention to people and organisation, creating a framework for successful entrepreneurship, with adequate utilisation of home-grown marketing and technological expertise. He calls for the integration at Cork level of all State agencies, and the production of an 'integrated regional development plan, with a strong 'community enterprise' component. A key factor in the development process is the provision of enterprise incubation facilities. He falls short of calling for the 'integrated regional development agency' to relate to a decision-centre at regional level, with fiscal powers and a democratic control-loop, but the logic leads in that direction, and with the support of Joe Lee and others must sooner or later crystallise out into a lobby that the politicians will have to listen to.

Kelleher, like the present writer, belongs to the age-cohort which was marginalised in the 50s emigration, gained experience abroad, and came back ready to put it to work but were in effect rejected because they were saying that radical reforms were necessary. This pamphlet consists of two parts, the first a reprint of an article in the May 1985 issue of the Crane Bag, the second a reprint of an article analysing the national energy problem, from the Engineers Journal. It is a reprint in the sense that it appears as a reproduction of a page-proof; the actual article never saw the light of day, being axed by the IEI Board, no doubt under political pressure. He went on to read it as a paper to a meeting of the Engineering and Scientific Association, for which he was awarded the Purser Cup in 1983.

Stereotyped thinking, following British traditions and practice, is the main problem, according to Kelleher; Zen and the Art of Motor-cycle Maintenance he suggests as a 'seminal psychological insight into the human alienation arising from the non-conjugation of (C P Snow's) two cultural systems...'.

The misprint-rate in the Crane Bag reprint is, perhaps, another good measure of the problem. The present writer has given word-perfect text to that publication, only to see the entropy-level rise, apparently of its own accord, between submission and publication-time. For those who don't know about entropy, see Kelleher.

The 1986 Science in Ireland 1800-1930 Conference Report

Rural Technology

Between Michael Shiel's history of rural electrification in the Republic under the leadership of the Electricity Supply Board and Wallace Clark's family epic of the linen-mills of Upperlands near Maghera on the Clady river, there is an interesting complementarity which may perhaps help to illuminate an aspect of the problem of Irish nationality.

Clark traces the history of his family firm from its origins in the 1700s to the present day. The key invention was the beetling-mill, dating from the 1730s: 'Fine weaving may have been learnt from the French and points of bleaching from the Dutch, but harnessing of water-power to the processing of linen came from the Anglo-Irish inventors. Ireland is blessed, more than most countries, with rivers of fall of about one in thirty, and width around 30 feet; of a flow which a private individual could dam, ideal for waterwheels.' The beetling-mill was an adaptation of the hammer-mill or the spade-mill to the needs of the linen process, replacing one of the more laborious operations.

Jackson Clark dammed the Clady in 1740 and initiated the development of an industrial complex which lived entirely from the water-power of the Clady right up to 1889, when the first steam-engine was bought to power a stenter-frame. Prior to this the power for the mills had come entirely from a series of water-wheels and, later, turbines (incidentally, for Clark's benefit, a Belfast invention first described by Thompson at the 1852 meeting of the British Association in Belfast, under the name 'vortex water-wheel'). The extra cost of steam, at -30 per HP-year compared to -3 for water, paid off by providing independence of the weather. Water-power remains, however, an important supplementary energy-source to this day. Indeed, it provided as early as 1908 a source of modern-standard 220-volt AC, when most municipal utilities were on the old Edison 110-volt DC standard.

Social historians will find useful material illustrating the paternalist company-town which arose as the fruits of Ulster Protestant rural enterprise. Written as it is from the angle of the leading family, it leaves gaps in the record to be filled by social (particularly labour) and political historians, although the period described so well by Michael Farrell in 'The Arming of the Protestants' is touched upon; one has to read between the lines here.

Once these limitations are recognised, we are left with an interesting and readable book, of significant interest to the economic historian and to historians of technology. It is a pity the author didn't give more attention to this aspect in the indexing, which is somewhat sparse.

Turning now to Michael Shiel, we have a well-researched and documented history of the ESB rural electrification scheme, which formally extended from 1946 to 1976, bringing electricity to 99% of the houses in the country.. There is scope for someone to develop the pre-history of electricity in Ireland; this is skated over in one short chapter dealing with the pre-ESB scene, in which credit is given to Callan in Maynooth for his early (1830s) work on electromagnetic induction, and to Parnell for switching on the first public lighting in Carlow in 1889. The latter was supplied from a flour-mill four miles away: is there a story here to parallel Clark's? There were 161 separate electricity systems in the Free State in 1925. All these were subsumed into the ESB in 1927 and shortly after, and most generators were shut down. It would be interesting to know what was the statistics of the 161: how many were municipal, how many 'big-houses', how many industrial enterprises. I suspect that there was a strong Protestant component in this early electrification, associated with the process of 'improving landlords' transforming themselves into an industrial bourgeoisie; possibly there was a significant Quaker component: very much the southern analogue of the Clark process, but less concentrated and on the whole less successful.

(If credits are to be given in the pre-history, why only Callan? What about Parsons, the centenary of whose steam turbine was celebrated this year with an international conference in Dublin, and Purser Griffith, who not only pioneered peat production but systematically drew attention to Irish hydro-electric potential, providing a foundation for McLaughlin's subsequent successful assault on the Shannon? This is the type of touchy issue that underlies Irish nationality; an 'us and them' question. What do 'they' have to do before 'we' accept 'them' as 'us'?)

This was all leapfrogged by the ESB, which in a decade brought Ireland into the vanguard of European technology, with a copious supply via a national grid at 20% of the previous cost per unit. This was the most impressive achievement of the partially-complete Irish democratic revolution: cheap energy for the people, the Catholic peasantry triumphant breaking the monopoly hitherto held by the Protestant landlords and capitalists. By 1939 there were 170,000 consumers connected, rising (somewhat miraculously) through the war years to 240,000 in 1945. There remained, however, 400,000 rural dwellings in darkness.

Pre-war approaches to rural electrification had been limited to within 2 km of the existing transmission network; this had been laid out with the main towns in mind. Lemass in 1939 called for new plans, and by December 1942 the ESB had produced the essentials of what became the 1944 White Paper, which was substantially the plan as implemented. It was a very substantial scheme, involving 1M poles, 75,000 miles of new distribution-line additional to the 2000 miles then existing, 100,000 transformers. A special organisation was set up under W F Roe, which recruited raw graduate engineers, demobbed army-men and local trainee craftsmen into a quietly efficient organisation which gained universal respect. In the words of the Parish Priest of Carnaross, Co Meath, '...these nice people came amongst us, did their job with speed and efficiency......behaved quietly and decently and left without any fuss or display..'

The firm of Unidare came into being to supply cable and transformers. Numerous small firms now exist in remote places, like Gweedore and Clontibret, due to local entrepreneurship doing what can be done with cheap power. Inmost cases the 'fixed charge' (or 'ground rent' as it was called in some places where it was a bone of contention) was recovered by simply replacing the old battery radio: in pre-transistor days these had vacuum-tubes and required two separate power-sources, both expensive.

Coasters were used to ship the poles and heavy equipment to small Western ports, especially Donegal. Most of the poles came from Finland, Irish forestry not yet being well-grown. There is a reference to the use of Irish in the negotiation of the contract, to financial advantage. This aspect of nationality needs to be sung louder. I have heard of other instances. It might even appeal to Wallace Clark, and help him and his fellow-Irish Protestant entrepreneurs to take positive advantage of the opportunities presented by the New Ireland Forum!

Towards the end of Michael Shiel's book there emerge signs of strain: has the ESB, under rural political pressures, over-invested in a dispersed system that will have difficulty in becoming economic? Small, decentralised local electricity generation is again in favour and many of the old mill-sites are being re-activated. Cost-conscious rural-dwellers turn to LPG for cooking. Microelectronics is beginning to be used to schedule the farm load and chop peaks that would overload the fragile network. We have yet to develop the full implications of the gas grid: we could be back to municipal generation, with combined heat and power, by 2000. Maybe it will emerge that the isolated farm dwelling is an anachronism and we should be in villages, like the continentals. Sociologists in 50 years time may blame rural electrification for helping to perpetuate the individualistic tradition of dispersed high-cost living, where it would have made more technical, economic and social sense to have built up the villages.

The Census Atlas is the first general atlas of Irish agriculture since that of L Dudley Stamp in 1931. It gives the 1980 position, in some cases with % changes since 1970, for 52 agricultural products and factors of production, by district. Observers of regional trends since EEC entry, among others, will find it useful. Where possible the data is all-Ireland. On the whole, the trend for cattle to replace people continues, rural electrification notwithstanding.

Cantillon

Richard Cantillon: Entrepreneur and Economist; Antoin E Murphy, (Clarindon Press, UK#25).

Cities and Merchants: French and Irish Perspectives on Urban Development, 1500-1900; ed P Butel and L M Cullen (Modern History Dept, TCD; NPG)

It is Ireland's tragedy that the intellectual potential of the clash of cultures represented by the Cromwellian settlement and the old Norman-Irish order seldom came to fruition on its home ground. The aspirant intellectual elite of the enslaved nation has two options open, both uncomfortable: go abroad and have your talents recognised, or stay at home and be ignored. Swift managed to survive uneasily in the two categories; his political satires were influential in the English market, for which he mostly wrote them, while Berkeley's economic classic, the Querist, which analysed the colonial obverse of the situation depicted by Adam Smith, and foreshadowed much modern thinking on third-world problems, has remained in the shadows (despite the best efforts of my late father Joe Johnston towards its rehabilitation).

Cantillon emigrated with the Wild Geese, and made his career as a banker. He came of a dispossessed Kerry Catholic landed family, and found his way into banking in Paris via Sir Daniel Arthur, who was banker to the Jacobite emigres, and also served the English government in the financing of the Peninsular War.

This was the epoch of the South Sea Bubble, and its French counterpart, the Mississippi Scheme, which were prototype capitalist investment manias. Smart operators could make money by knowing how to get out in time, and this Cantillon did with success, taking advantage of the lag-times between the various European financial centres.

He managed however to run foul of some of the English investors to whom he had loaned money against speculative shareholdings, and subsequently ran into litigation, to the extent that he apparently stage-managed his own death, his house being burned down, a corpse being provided by the local resurrection-men. A mysterious French aristocrat later turns up in the Dutch East Indies, but disappears when called upon to prove his identity, leaving Cantillon's papers behind.

If this were the full story we would have good material for a rattling good TV series, which I look forward to seeing when it comes out. The real meat however is in his economic treatise "Essai sur la Nature de Commerce en General", which was published posthumously in 1755, along with other economic writings that formed part of the intellectual ferment leading up to the French Revolution. This work ranks among the classics of the Enlightenment, and provided in embryo the seeds of most modern economic thinking. In particular, he develops a theory of the role of the entrepreneur, as the "Maxwell's Demon" behind the working of Adam Smith's "invisible hand". (Economists I predict will in the end have to come round to borrowing this concept from physics, when they get to understand the thermodynamic analogy and the entropy-reducing essence of entrepreneurship, just as the sociologists have borrowed the "Heisenberg Effect" from another branch of physics).

In a biography of Cantillon it would be too much to expect cross-reference to the Querist, as Cantillon and Berkeley would hardly have had a chance to interact. There are two passing references to Swift, both on the fringe of Cantillon's English banking clientele. There is a future PhD thesis in systematising classical economic thought in Ireland, or having Irish origins, and relating it to the imperial-colonial scene. In such a study the Querist and the Essai would have pride of place. One could extend the study, taking in the roles of emigre intellectuals from the fringes of the imperial systems, to include the work of John Law, the Scottish emigre who was Minister for Finance to Louis XIV, and who attempted to develop the Mississippi Scheme into a means of financing the State, with disastrous consequences. Cantillon and Law were acquainted and controversed.

Cities and Merchants is a conference proceedings; it prints the papers delivered to the fourth meeting of Irish and French historians in Dublin in 1984. It deals with urban environments, institutions, planning, merchant communities etc in Dublin, Cork, Bordeaux, Paris, Belfast; there is a remote-colonial dimension touched upon, with Saint Domingue as example.

There is food for thought in the fact that Bordeaux has imposed its dominance on Aquitaine to an extent comparable to Paris on France, and indeed Dublin on Ireland. If comparative studies are to be done, it would help if there were to be established some framework involving a concept of national or proto-national communities within the centralist imperial systems. In such a framework potential independent national viability might be measured by an even distribution of decent-sized cities, while the total dominance of one major centre is an indicator of an essentially colonial slave-minded situation.

In such a study of France, Brittany should come out as the interesting place to compare with Ireland. The influence on contemporary Brittany of its historic independent statehood prior to 1580, with a distinct civilisation based on the Breton language, has received the sympathetic attention from French scholarship that it deserves. Franco-Irish relations in historiography could be fruitful if as a result this aspect is opened up. The Vendee and the Chouans are both "dirty words" in the French republican vocabulary. It would be of interest to compare them, and relate them to the resistance of the Irish to Cromwell, and, indeed, the resistance of the Algerians to the French in more recent times.

The whole question of core-fringe relationships in imperial systems needs to be opened up by historians, particularly from the fringe. After all, Napoleon was a Corsican, and Stalin was a Georgian.

Schroedinger

Schroedinger: Life and Thought. By Walter Moore. Cambridge U P; 482 pp; UK£25 H/B; US$39.50.

Eamonn de Valera made a creditable attempt to enhance Ireland's image abroad as a world-centre for scientific culture, with his foundation of the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies in the 40s, for which he subsequently gained international recognition with the award of an FRS.

Schroedinger was his most famous 'catch'; others who came later (Heitler, Janossy, Lanczos, Synge) together made the DIAS in the late 40s and early 50s into a centre for theoretical physics of top international rating.

This was little appreciated in Ireland at the time; the culture-gap between the Irish general public and the cream of European physics was well expressed by Myles na Gopaleen, whose scathing remarks (2 St Patricks and no God etc) drew down threats of law-suits. Schroedinger and Myles however subsequently became friends, and the latter consulted the former on literary matters relating to central Europe.

Walter Moore, who himself is a retired physical chemist of international reputation, has produced a biographical tour de force, covering the scientific and human career of the man and his times, throwing in with rare insight the political background, to which Schroedinger reacted with extraordinary naivety.

He has written a book which not only treats in depth the evolution of his scientific thought, which led to his 1926 discovery of the equation bearing his name, but also weaves in 40 years of European politics and 2 world wars, with a series of vibrant love-affairs into the bargain. It is to be regretted that the identity of the 'dark lady', in whose company in an Alpine hotel in 1926 he made his Nobel Prize-winning creative leap, remains undiscovered; most of the others are named, including the Dublin series; the present writer was acquainted with at least one of them, but at the time never suspected.

Walter Moore does not flinch from giving the full theoretical treatment of Schroedinger's key contributions, and this will undoubtedly be useful to future historians and philosophers of science, and researchers interested in the process of creative thinking. Readers interested in the human, political and social aspects however can skip with impunity.

Scientific readers interested in strengthening their understanding of the historical development of scientific ideas will find the book extraordinarily useful, in that where there is an influence of any kind, individual or institutional, Moore follows it up and gives the background, enough to enable its significance in the Schroedinger context to be assessed. We have a mine of scientific historical information, well indexed.

Those who are interested in European intellectual history, in the political environment of Europe in the decades between the wars, will also find it a good read. After progressing from Zurich to Berlin, at the pinnacle of European intellectual life before the Nazis came to power, Shroedinger managed to escape to Oxford, with discreet help from Lindemann, resigning his Berlin Chair, receiving a letter of thanks from Hitler. After looking at Edinburgh and Princeton, he then decided to go to Graz shortly before the Anchsluss. When the Nazis moved in, it turned out that he was on a black list, and it is at this point, in 1938, that de Valera picked him up. This was lucky for Schroedinger, as by then he had written a compromising letter to the press, which made him look as if he was welcoming the Anchluss; this put him in the bad books of Lindemann and those in Britain who were taking care of anti- Fascist intellectual refugees.

He kept up his intellectual output, though like Einstein never surpassing the creativity of his youth. However his seminal book 'What is Life' introduced the concept of the 'genetic code'; he calculated quantitatively, from X-ray induced mutation data, the scale of the information-coding process involved, and estimated the size of the gene. The present writer was privileged to have attended one of the lectures on which it was based; he subsequently bought the book, and gained insights into the physics of the extremes of complexity, then the 'new frontier' of physics, the extremes of scale being well taken care of by the mainstream.

The seminality of 'What is Life' is expressed in the fact that it influenced Francis Crick to turn in the direction he did, subsequently, along with Watson, discovering the double helix structure of DNA.

The history of the publication of 'What is Life' however does much to discredit Ireland as an environment for world-class scientific discovery; de Valera's implant never evolved comfortably into a graft. It was to have been published by Cahill, Basil Clancy being in charge; the latter had to preside over the break-up of the type when publication subsequently was blocked under Church influence. It was subsequently published by the Cambridge University Press.

The interesting task for the future, viewed from the Irish angle, is the analysis of the origins, partial realisation and effective ultimate failure of de Valera's vision. Why was it, when we had the opportunity presented by scientific figures of Schroedinger's stature among us, that we allowed the anti-bodies to get to work and reject the implant?

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999