OnTheTown: Love of an academic kind was in the air on St Valentine's night at the Royal Irish Academy in Dawson Street, Dublin, at the signing in of two new members.
Loretta Brennan Glucksman, chairwoman of the America Ireland Fund and Dr William Harris, director general of the Science Foundation of Ireland, are the newly elected members of the RIA, which was founded in 1785 to promote excellence in the sciences and the humanities.
In honour of the occasion, many of the academy's rare books and manuscripts were put on display by RIA librarian, Siobhán Fitzpatrick. These works included Dialoghi di Amore from the Thomas Moore collection, dating from 1565, and an ornate Book of Hours, which was owned by Mary Queen of Scots.
Membership of the 220-year-old academy is a mark of rare distinction in the world of academia. The academy now has 342 members across the fields of science and humanities. Other RIA members at the signing in included Dr Garret FitzGerald, Dr Edward Walsh, of the University of Limerick, Dr John Hegarty, Provost of TCD and Dr Ena Prosser, of Bioresearch Ireland.
The occasion was also marked by the evening's lecture by one of the world's leading scientists, Prof Alain Aspect, of the Institut d'Optique, Orsay and of the École Polytechnique, Palaiseau, where he teaches a course on lasers and quantum optics. His talk, entitled "From Einstein and Bell to Quantum Information: Amazing Entanglement", was about the work of Belfast man John Bell who explored the meaning of quantum physics. Bell's inequalities helped us confirm some of the strangest consequences, which are still hotly debated today, he said.