A university in Ireland has dumped the name of physicist Erwin Schrödinger from one of its lecture halls after it emerged that the Nobel Prize winner was a paedophile.
Trinity College Dublin, located in Ireland’s capital city, has dropped the name of Erwin Schrödinger from one of its lecture halls after it emerged that he was a paedophile.
The lecture hall had previously played host to the physicist — one of the world’s best known for his easily-comprehended thought experiment featuring a cat of uncertain health sealed inside a box — with one of the famous ‘What is Life’ lectures given in the room in 1943.
According to a report by The Times, the name of the lecture hall will now revert simply to the original name of “Physics Lecture Theatre”, after an Irish Times report revealed evidence that Schrödinger was what the publication called “a serial abuser whose behaviour fitted the profile of a paedophile in the widely understood sense of that term”.
“There was a diversity of opinion on how the school and college should react, but it was clear that a large majority of both staff and students now favour changing the name [of] the lecture theatre in the Fitzgerald Building that has borne his name since the 1990s,” The Times reports the TCD School of Physics head, Jonathan Coleman, as saying.
Coleman went on to mention that a renaming of the lecture hall would not take place for the time being over the worry that Schrödinger’s legacy “would be seen as a tainted honour”.
However, a notice commemorating the ‘What is Life’ lectures, at least one of which was held in the hall in question, may still end up being present within the room, according to the academic.
Although Austrian by birth, Schrödinger came to Ireland by invite of Irish revolutionary Éamon de Valera to help found the nation’s “Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies”.
The physicist eventually become an Irish citizen in 1948.
The question of the legacy of major figures within European history and culture has been centre-stage in recent months with a series of recent controversies.
Trinity College Dublin itself has launched an “extensive project” to re-examine its legacy of colonialism in direct response to the Black Lives Matter movement, which originated in the United States.
The case of Schrödinger’s sexual abuse of minors coming to light long after his death passes at least superficial similarity to the case of British artist Eric Gill, who was extremely well-respected and influential on establishment tastes in his lifetime. Yet decades after his death Gill, whose sculpture and typographical works helped forge the image of Britain in the 20th century, was revealed to have been a prolific abuser who raped his own children and even the family dog.
As Breitbart London reported earlier this month, a prominent statue by Gill of a naked child gracing the front of the London headquarters of the BBC was vandalised by a man with a stepladder and hammer.
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