Many people have heard of Schrodinger and his famous cat, but few realise that he lived and worked in Dublin for more than 16 years, and at one stage had a run-in of sorts with Myles na gCopaleen, the celebrated Irish Times columnist.
Erwin Schrodinger was one of the most eminent quantum physicists in the last century. His celebrated "wave equation" developed in the 1920s was one of the greatest advances in modern science. For it he shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with Paul Dirac.
He used his famous hypothetical cat to highlight one of the more curious paradoxes of quantum mechanics, where quantum uncertainty suggested the possibility of the cat being not quite dead but not quite alive either, a paradox which is still not resolved.
Schrodinger came to Ireland at the instigation of Eamon de Valera, then Taoiseach, in 1939.
De Valera helped him to escape with his wife to England from the Nazis.
At this stage enabling legislation for the institute was not yet in place, and Schrodinger found work giving lectures in University College Dublin. It was not until mid-1940 that the legislation was passed in the Dail and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies was inaugurated.
The institute had two schools, for Celtic studies and theoretical physics, and Schrodinger was appointed professor in the latter.
For the remainder of the war he stayed in Dublin. Although he was offered a post in Austria after the war, he stayed on at the institute until 1956.
It was in 1942 that Schrodinger crossed the path of Brian O'Nolan, who was writing a column in The Irish Times under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen.
Schrodinger had given a lecture to the Dublin University Metaphysical Society in which he gave reasons for "not regarding causality as an irremissable necessity of thought", as he put it, and claimed that "openmindedness towards these questions was the most imperative demand".
Myles was not impressed with an argument that could conceivably do away with "the principle of a first cause".
He let fly at the institute in his column during November 1942, and attacked both Schrodinger and Alfred O'Rahilly. O'Rahilly was professor of mathematical physics at UCC.
He had given a lecture to the institute's school of Celtic studies on "Palladius and Patrick". Myles wrote in his column: "Talking of this notorious Institute (Lord, what I would give for a chair in it with me thousand good-lookin' pounds a year for doing `work' that most people regard as recreation), a friend has drawn my attention to Professor O'Rahilly's recent address on `Palladius and Patrick'.
"I understand also that Professor Schrodinger has been proving lately that you cannot establish a first cause. The first fruit of this Institute, therefore, has been to show that there are two Saint Patricks and no God.
"The propagation of heresy and unbelief has nothing to do with polite learning, and unless we are careful this Institute of ours will make us the laughing stock of the world."
Schrodinger laughed off the comments, but the council of the institute was incensed and demanded an apology from the paper. Robert Smyllie, then editor, gave it, along with an assurance that Myles na gCopaleen would never again mention the institute in his column. Thus the furore died down.