12 - The last decade

Summary

In this chapter I shall describe the last decade of Eddington's life and answer the remaining three questions I raised – those appropriate to FT. This last decade was less happy than his earlier life. Here again the temper of his internal intellectual activity was in tune with the external circumstances. The world outside Cambridge was initially preparing for war and afterwards involved in it. The depression produced by this failure of humankind to act rationally was augmented for Eddington by his own failure to put over his ideas in RTPE. As I argued in the last chapter, this was evidenced less by the uncomprehending reviews than by the lack of follow-up of the ideas. Eddington became less in evidence at the Royal Astronomical Society and in the University as he busied himself at the Observatory in writing what was meant to be the definitive exposition of his work, Fundamental Theory (Eddington 1946).

Schrödinger

There are two personal details of his life in these latter years that bear on this. The first of these arose in 1942 when an invitation came from Dublin. In 1940 de Valera, an applied mathematician at heart, had achieved a long-standing ambition to persuade the Daíl to set up an Institute of Advanced Studies, including a School of Theoretical Physics. His move at that time owed much to the availability of Erwin Schrödinger, who had been dismissed from his chair in Graz not very long after the Anschluss. The essentially political life of de Valera had left him little time to keep in touch with academic happenings but he had many friends who could advise him, especially Sir Edmund Whittaker.