President Gordon had hoped that schrödinger would arrive in Oxford by October 21, so that he could matriculate and receive the M.A. degree that had been arranged for him (a requirement for the fellowship), but the Vllth Solvay Conference was to be held in Brussels, October 22 to 29, and he was obliged to attend this. The schrödingers stayed at the elegant Hotel Gallia et Brittanique, and as usual Erwin arrived looking more like a Tirolean mountaineer than a distinguished scientist. Hilde March joined them there, and she wrote to Lindemann that she would be coming to Oxford with the schrödingers, while her husband would be delayed. He replied that they were looking forward to seeing her and he hoped that she would ‘persuade Professor March to come over as soon as possible’.

Seventh Solvay Conference

The Vllth Council of Physics of the Solvay Institute, devoted to ‘Structure and Properties of Atomic Nuclei’, was opened by its President, Paul Langevin, on October 23 at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. Thirty-five of the most eminent workers in the field comprised the members of the scientific committee and the invited members of conference. Six members were from Cambridge. The German universities were represented by Walter Bothe (Heidelberg), Werner Heisenberg, Pieter Debye (Leipzig), and Lise Meitner who was still holding out at the Hahn Institute in Berlin. Marie Curie and Frederic Joliot, and both Maurice and Louis de Broglie came from Paris. The only American member was Ernest Lawrence from Berkeley. This was the first conference devoted to nuclear structure and nuclear reactions; with the discoveries of the neutron and positron, dramatic progress had been achieved in this field during the past few years and the results presented at the conference were important and exciting.

The discussions after the formal papers were extensive and lively, but schrödinger took little part in them.

Niels Bohr was fond of quoting ‘an old Danish proverb’ to the effect that ‘prediction is always difficult, especially of the future’. schrödinger later described his decision to return to Austria in 1936 as a miscalculation of the political situation that was ‘an unprecedented stupidity’, but it would not have seemed so at the time. He was not satisfied with the quality of life in either Britain or America, and old friends like Fritz Kohlrausch in Graz and Hans Thirring in Vienna were urging him to return to his native land. Hans even offered to relinquish his Vienna post if Erwin preferred that one.

Nevertheless, Erwin knew that in going to Graz, he was stepping into a cesspool of Nazi activity. The university was a center for the Styrian Nazi party, whose leader was Armand Dadieu, professor of physical chemistry. More than half the students were active Nazis and they dominated the campus. The principal Graz newspaper, Der Tagespost, followed the Nazi line and the provincial Heimwehr was controlled by the party.

The Austrian situation

During the fifteen years that schrödinger had lived abroad, the history of Austria had been marked by political strife between two major forces, the Christian Socialists or ‘blacks’ and the Social Democrats or ‘reds’. Antisemitism in Austria, with its Catholic culture, was more prevalent but less extreme than in Germany. The clerical party was traditionally antisemitic; for example, in 1933, its chairman, with the good German name of Czermak, announced that ‘the religious German must decisively reject baptism as an “entrance ticket” for Jews’. There were about 190000 Jews in Austria, with 176000 in Vienna (9% of population of city) where they were prominent in learned professions, the press, music and the arts. As in Germany, the universities were citadels of antisemitism and it was difficult for even distinguished Jewish scholars to obtain professorships.

In 1932, the clericals selected Engelbert Dollfuss as chancellor. This diminutive politician (Millimetternich) was motivated by a colossal vanity and a paranoid hatred of the Social Democrats who comprised almost fifty per cent of his compatriots. At the urging of Mussolini, he suspended parliament on March 4,1933, and established a fully fascist one-party state, committed to the fight against two internal enemies, the ‘reds’ and the Austrian Nazis.

Soon after the end of the war, schrödinger's friends in Austria began to explore various avenues for his return to his native land, but it was to prove a long and tedious process. As early as February, 1946, he agreed to accept a professorship at Vienna, provided he could find a suitable successor for his position at D.I.A.S. In April, the Austrian authorities advised that he should apply for a restoration of his professorship at Graz, and then they would arrange a transfer to Vienna, but he was not willing to do this without a more definite understanding.

The main problem was the continuing occupation of Austria by the four allied powers. In January, 1947, General Kurasov told General Mark Clark: ‘I expect there will be an Austrian treaty. We have done enough for Austria and it is time we got out.’ The winter of 1947 was unusually harsh and there were food riots in Vienna recalling those of 1919. An attempted communist coup in May did not succeed, and in June, Austria was included in the Marshall plan, receiving more dollars per capita during its first year than any other country. In February, 1948, communists took over control of Czechoslovakia, and Stalin showed no willingness to conclude an Austrian peace treaty.

Thus, although schrödinger told his friends that he wished to return to Austria, he also made it clear that he had no intention of doing so while the threat of a Russian takeover remained. As the peace negotiations dragged on, they became increasingly acrimonious. In October, 1950, there was a second attempt at a communist putsch. Karl Renner, the socialist president, who in 1938 had advised his followers to vote for Hitler, protested to the British government: ‘You sacrificed the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1919, and in 1938 you abandoned Austria for Czechoslovakia, which you then abandoned also. These are bad precedents.’

The situation at the Vienna Physics Institute was rather surprising. As the Russians approached in 1945, the Nazi boss of the Institute, Georg Stetter, fled to Egypt with his assistant Ortner, and Hans Thirring was recalled to his old position.

The city of Zürich is divided by the River Limmat into the newer Grosse Stadt on the left bank, and the Kleine Stadt on the right bank, where the E.T.H. and University are located on heights overlooking the city, the river, and its source in the Zürcher See. The schrödingers rented a spacious flat consisting of an entire floor of a modern stucco house called Zu Vier Wachten [At The Four Guards] at 9 Huttenstrasse, a broad avenue just a few blocks behind the university.

Liegekur

Even before his lectures for the winter term began, Erwin was physically and psychologically exhausted. As he wrote about a year later to Pauli, ‘I was actually so kaput that I could no longer get any sensible ideas. Not the least to blame for it were the many complications, the constant decisions about one's own fate, negotiations with ministries, etc., which I was not at all cut out for. Now that's all finished for a long time.’ Also he had lost his father, his mother, and a grandfather within the past two years. He had scarcely started his lectures when he was forced by a severe attack of bronchitis to interrupt them in the middle of November. He suffered intermittent respiratory illnesses during the winter, from which he never managed to recover completely; finally a mild case of pulmonary tuberculosis was suspected, probably a recurrence of the infection of the apical lung area that was noted two years previously in Vienna. He was ordered to undertake a complete rest cure [Liegekur] at high altitude. The only bright aspect of this miserable winter was that his financial worries were over. Anny was able to engage a wonderful cook from Vienna, who expertly provided all their favorite dishes. This cuisine was a happy change from the near starvation of the postwar years in Germany and Austria.

The place chosen for Erwin's Liegekur was Arosa, an Alpine Kurort at about 1700 m altitude, not far from the ski-resort of Davos, and overlooked by the great peak of the Weisshorn. Anny worried about Erwin like a mother with a sick child; she could not do enough to take care of him. The Viennese cook was there to provide culinary comforts.

The establishment of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies was due almost entirely to the efforts of one man, Eamon de Valera, the Taoiseach [prime minister] of Ireland. Dev, as he was called by friend and foe, was born in New York City in 1882, so that he was five years older than schrödinger. His mother, Kate Coll, was an Irish servant girl, and his father, Vivion de Valera, a delicate Spanish artist. Eddie, their only child, was three years old when the father died, and he was brought to Ireland to be raised by his grandmother in a cottage at Bruree, County Limerick. As a schoolboy, mathematics was his best subject and he never lost his love for it.

Dev was always a devout Catholic, in fact, a daily communicant. At that time it was not easy for a Catholic to get a university degree in Ireland, since Trinity College Dublin (T.C.D.) was almost exclusively Protestant and the Royal University of Ireland gave examinations but no courses. In 1904, however, Dev received the B.A. degree from the Royal University, and the following year had his first opportunity to attend some good lectures in mathematics, given by Arthur Con way at the newly established University College Dublin (U.C.D.). From 1906 to 1908 he followed a course in mathematical physics by Edmund Whittaker, who was professor of astronomy at T.C.D. and Royal Astronomer at the Dunsink Observatory. In 1908, Dev joined the Gaelic League and began an intensive study of the Irish language, which became an intellectual love second only to mathematics. In 1910, he married his Gaelic teacher, Sinead Flanagan, and they had seven children.

In 1913 Dev became convinced that Ireland would never obtain any measure of self government without a show of force. He joined the Irish Volunteers, an underground military organization, quickly rising to commandant of one of the Dublin battalions. In the Easter Rising of 1916, his assignment was to defend the southeastern approaches to Dublin, after the principal buildings in the city center had been seized by the Irish army and the Republic proclaimed by Patrick Pearse. The organization of the rising was bungled, but in any case it was doomed to failure once British reinforcements arrived with artillery.

NEWTON SET OUT FOR CAMBRIDGE early in June 1661. There was no greater watershed in his life. Although he would return to Woolsthorpe infrequently during the next eighteen years, with two extended visits during the plague, spiritually he now left it, and what a later commentator has called the idiocy of rural life, once and for all. Three short years would put him beyond any possibility of return, though three more years, perhaps somewhat longer, had to pass before a permanent stay in Cambridge was assured. His accounts show that he stopped at Sewstern, presumably to check on his property there; and after spending a second night at Stilton as he skirted the Great Fens, he arrived at Cambridge on the fourth of June and presented himself at Trinity College the following day. If the procedures set forth in the statutes were followed, the senior dean and the head lecturer of the college examined him to determine if he was fit to hear lectures. He was admitted – although there is no record whatever of anything but the verdict, one feels constrained to add – “forthwith.” He purchased a lock for his desk, a quart bottle and ink to fill it, a notebook, a pound of candles, and a chamber pot and was ready for whatever Cambridge might offer.

Admission to a college was not tantamount to admission to the university. Many delayed matriculation in the university; a considerable number who had no interest in a degree, to which alone matriculation was relevant, managed to avoid it altogether. Newton did intend to take a degree. On 8 July, together with a number of students recently admitted to Trinity and to other colleges, he duly swore that he would preserve the privileges of the university as much as in him lay, that he would save harmless its state, honor, and dignity as long as he lived, and that he would defend the same by his vote and counsel; and to testify to the same he paid his fee and saw his name entered in the university's matriculation book. He was now a full-fledged member of the university.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that Newton chose to enter Trinity, “the famousest College in the University” in the opinion of John Strype, the future ecclesiastical historian, who was an undergraduate in Jesus College at the time.

THE PAPER ON COLORS that Newton sent to the Royal Society early in 1672 in the form of a letter addressed to Henry Oldenburg did not contain anything new from Newton's point of view. The occasion provided by the telescope had come at an opportune time. At Barrow's behest, Newton had been revising Barrow's lectures for publication during the winter. He had not found it a great chore to produce a succinct statement of his own theory buttressed by three prismatic experiments that he took to be most compelling. He thought it relevant to include a special discussion of how the discovery had led him to devise the reflecting telescope. The continuing correspondence provoked by the initial paper, which intruded intermittently on his time and consciousness during the following six years, also involved only one addition to his optics, his introduction to diffraction and brief investigation of it. Aside from diffraction, the entire thrust of his concern with optics during the period was the exposition of a theory already elaborated.

The continuing discussion forced Newton to clarify some issues. When he wrote in 1672, he had not yet fully separated the issue of heterogeneity from his corpuscular conception of light, and he allowed himself to assert that, because of his discovery, it could “be no longer disputed . . . whether Light be a Body.” He could hardly have been more mistaken. Within a week of the paper's presentation, Robert Hooke produced a critique that mistook corpuscularity for its central argument and proceeded to dispute it with some asperity. The lesson was not wasted. Though he continued to believe in the corpuscular conception, Newton learned to insist that the essence of his theory of colors lay in heterogeneity alone. This was a matter of clarification and exposition, however, not an alteration of his theory. The very fact that six years of discussion effected no change, such that his Opticks, finally published in 1704, merely restated conclusions worked out in the late 1660s, testifies to the intensity and rigor of the early investigation.

The discussion that followed on the paper of 1672 tells us less about optics than about Newton. For eight years he had locked himself in a remorseless struggle with Truth. Genius of Newton's order exacts a toll.

WELL BEFORE THE CONTESTED EDITION of Flamsteed's Historia Coelestis in 1712 brought that episode to a temporary conclusion, two new concerns, which would dominate Newton's life for more than five years, had imposed themselves upon him. In 1709, work began in earnest on a second edition of the Prindpia. In the spring of 1711, a letter from Leibniz to Hans Sloane, secretary of the Royal Society, inaugurated a heated controversy over claims of priority in the invention of the calculus. Moreover, a fourth problem of great import for Newton was also taking form. Already an ugly scene with Craven Peyton, the warden of the Mint, had signaled a deterioration of their relations which culminated in a major crisis in the Mint in 1714, when the battle with Leibniz was reaching its highest pitch. The Mint was the bedrock on which Newton's existence in London stood. Trouble there had to affect his whole life. In its intensity, the period from 1711 to 1716, succeeding more than a decade of relative calm, matched the great periods of stress at Cambridge, when his relentless pursuit of truth stretched him to the limit. The coincidence of these events, the demands they placed on Newton, may help to explain the furious episode with Flamsteed at Crane Court on 26 October 1711 and much else from these years not yet mentioned.

The second edition of the Prindpia began first. Newton had been talking about it almost from the day the first edition appeared, first with Fatio, then with Gregory. With the move to London active plans languished for a time. They never died, however, and ultimately, on 25 March 1708, in some excitement, Gregory reported that the new edition was finally in the press in Cambridge.

There were certainly sound reasons not to put off the new edition any longer. Copies of the first edition were hard to come by and consequently expensive. What swayed Newton, however, were less these considerations than the manipulations of Richard Bentley, the academic entrepreneur now installed as master of Trinity College. Bentley had long made it his business to cultivate Newton and now aggressively maneuvered him into acquiescence in an edition which Bentley himself published through the university press.

THE ROYAL SOCIETY, to which Newton had dedicated his Prindpia in 1687 only to ignore it steadfastly when he moved to London, stood at a low ebb during the early years of his residence in the capital city. Membership, which had reached more than two hundred in the early years of the 1670s, now scarcely numbered more than half that figure, and meetings, given over mostly to miscellaneous chitchat devoid of serious scientific interest, suggested little of the interests that had brought the society together forty years earlier. The presence of Robert Hooke, not Newton's favorite natural philosopher, may well have determined his absence from the weekly meetings. Hooke was usually there. When Newton put in one of his rare appearances to show a “new instrument contrived by him,” a sextant, which would be useful in navigation, Hooke reminded him of past antipathies by claiming that he had invented it more than thirty years before. Hooke's death in March 1703 removed an obstacle and prepared the way for Newton's election as president at the next annual meeting on St. Andrew's Day, 30 November.

Obscurity covers the background to Newton's election. Spontaneous expressions of popular will did not govern the selection of officers of the Royal Society. In all probability, Dr. Hans Sloane, the secretary, made the prior arrangements. At the meeting on 30 November something nearly went awry. Newton was not a political leader who had only to be proposed to be elected. Only twenty-two of the thirty members present voted to place him on the council, a necessary preliminary to election as president. Once elected to the council, he still received only twenty-four votes for president. Clearly, a group within the Royal Society did not rush to welcome England's preeminent natural philosopher to the presidential chair. Truth to tell, they did not rush to reelect him the next year, and the absence of vote totals in the society's Journal Book the following two years strongly implies a continuing want of universal enthusiasm.

Less than two years after Newton's election, Queen Anne knighted him in Cambridge. Master of the Mint and president of the Royal Society, Sir Isaac Newton had become a personage of consequence. The attention he devoted to his coat of arms testifies that he recognized as much.

MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE mathematics dominated Newton's attention during the months that followed his discovery of the new world of science, although it did not completely obliterate other interests. Sometime during this period he also found time to compose the “Quaestiones,” in which he digested current natural philosophy as efficiently as he did mathematics. The other mathematicians and natural philosophers of Europe were unaware that a young man named Isaac Newton even existed. To those who knew of him, his fellow students in Trinity, he was an enigma. The first blossoms of his genius flowered in private, observed silently by his own eyes alone in the years 1664 to 1666, his anni mirabilis.

In addition to mathematics and natural philosophy, the university also made certain demands on his time and attention. He was scheduled to commence Bachelor of Arts in 1665, and regulations demanded that he devote the Lent term to the practice of standing in quadragesima. Pictured in our imagination, the scene has a surrealistic quality, medieval disputations juxtaposed with the birth pains of the calculus. An investigation of curvature was dated 20 February 1665, in the middle of the quadragesimal exercises, and in his various accounts of his mathematical development he assigned the binomial expansion to the winter between 1664 and 1665. While Stukeley was a student at Cambridge more than thirty years later, he heard that when Newton stood for his B.A. degree “he was put to second posing, or lost his groats as they term it, which is look'd upon as disgraceful.” The story raises several problems. The senate had already passed the grace granting his degree before the exercises were held, and Newton signed for this degree with the other candidates. If the story has any substance, it has to apply to prior examinations in the college. Nevertheless, as Stukeley remarked, it does not seem strange because Newton was not much concerned with the standard curriculum. Once more the laxity of the university worked to his advantage. Newton commenced B.A. largely because the university no longer believed in its own curriculum with enough conviction to enforce it.

In the summer of 1665, a disaster descended on many parts of England, including Cambridge. It had “pleased Almighty God in his just severity,” as Emmanuel College put it, “to visit this towne of Cambridge with the plague of pestilence.

ISAAC NEWTON was born early on Christmas Day 1642, in the manor house of Woolsthorpe near the village of Colsterworth, seven miles south of Grantham in Lincolnshire. Because Galileo, on whose discoveries much of Newton's own career in science would squarely rest, had died that year, a significance attaches itself to 1642.1 am far from the first to note it – and undoubtedly will be far from the last. Born in 1564, Galileo had lived nearly to the age of eighty. Newton would live nearly to the age of eighty-five. Between them they virtually spanned the entire Scientific Revolution, the central core of which their combined work constituted. In fact, only England's stiff-necked Protestantism permitted the chronological liaison. Because it considered that popery had fatally contaminated the Gregorian calendar, England was ten days out of phase with the Continent, where it was 4 January 1643 day Newton was born. We can sacrifice the symbol without losing anything of substance. It matters only that he was born and at such a time that he could utilize the work of Galileo and of other pioneers of modern science such as Kepler (who had been dead twelve years) and Descartes (who was still alive and active in the Netherlands).

Prior to Isaac, the Newton family was wholly without distinction and wholly without learning. As it knew steady economic advance during the century prior to Isaac's birth, we may assume that it was not without diligence and not without the intelligence that can make diligence fruitful. A Simon Newton, the first of the family to raise his head tentatively above rural anonymity, lived in Westby, a village about five miles southeast of Grantham, in 1524. Along with twenty-two other inhabitants of Westby, he had achieved the status of a taxpayer in the subsidy granted that year.

Fourteen of the twenty-two, including Simon Newton, paid the minimum assessment of 4d. Eight others paid assessments ranging from i id to 9s 6d, and one, Thomas Ellis, who was one of the richest men in Lincolnshire, paid more than £16. If the Newtons had risen above complete anonymity, clearly they did not rank very high in the social order, even in the village of Westby.

CRISES RACKED THE INSTITUTION to which Newton moved in the spring of 1696. Indeed, the Mint was an institution within an institution within an institution, all three of which faced crises. The recoinage engaged every pinch of energy at the Mint. The Treasury, of which the Mint was a relatively minor department, devoted equal energy to devising temporary expedients and new machinery to cope with overwhelming financial needs caused by war with France. The English state and the revolutionary settlement it embodied balanced precariously on the outcome of the Treasury's efforts. In 1696, it was not clear that the financial demands of the war would be met. If they were not, if national bankruptcy ensued, the revolutionary settlement would undoubtedly collapse before a second Stuart restoration. In the larger crises of the government and its finances Newton was not involved beyond his concern as an Englishman committed to the revolution.

The narrower monetary crisis, which bedeviled the financial crisis by reaching a climax when it could least be tolerated, occupied him almost completely for more than two years. As the debasement of silver coinage reached disastrous proportions, the government under the leadership of Newton's friend Charles Montague, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, began to consider a recoinage as the only effective remedy.

In 1695, the government sought what advice it could find. In the absence of a body of recognized experts on such matters, the Regency Council resolved to consult a number of leading intellectuals and London financiers, “Mr. Locke, Mr. D'Avenant, Sir Christopher Wren, Dr. Wallis, Dr. Newton, Mr. Heathcote, Sir Josiah Child, and Mr. Asgill, a lawyer.” Along with most of the others, Newton replied in the autumn of 1695 with a short essay “concerning the Amendmt of English Coyns.” A general consensus among the respondents, in which he shared, accepted the need to recoin. By December, the decision was made; on 21 January 1696, the definitive recoinage act passed through Parliament. The first melting of old coins at the Exchequer commenced the following day. Hence the recoinage was both decided and inaugurated well before Newton's appointment as warden of the Mint. Nor did his opinion on the recoinage determine the policy, which differed in a minor way from what he recommended. In no sense did Newton bear responsibility for the recoinage. He did accept responsibility for carrying it through to completion.

The PRIORITY DISPUTE dragged on with diminished intensity for A another six years and during that time continued to occupy a major part of Newton's consciousness. He had never been able to lay a project down easily. Wound up as tightly as he was now, and with his honor at stake, he could not put the dispute aside simply because his antagonist had died. It was 1723 when its final faint echo was Newton's refusal to reply to a letter from Bernoulli.

Among its other effects, the controversy served to remind Newton that he needed to give attention to his intellectual legacy. As a result, he devoted considerable attention during his old age to new editions of his works. In 1717, it was a new edition of the Opticks. He did not touch the body of the treatise, which continued to set forth conclusions as he had established them forty-five years earlier, but he composed a set of eight new Queries, which he inserted as Queries 17-24 between the original set of sixteen Queries in the first edition and the set of seven added to the Latin edition. Continuing a retreat from the radical stance of earlier years, he now postulated a cosmic aether to explain gravity. To be sure, the aether had so little in common with conventional mechanical fluids that the retreat was more apparent than real, and Newton may have intended it more as a sop than a concession. The aether, he said, was “exceedingly more rare and subtile than the Air, and exceedingly more elastick and active.” He concluded indeed that the ratio of its elastic force to its density must be more than 490 billion times that of air. Was such a medium possible? It was, Newton argued, if one supposed that the aether, like the air, is composed of “Particles which endeavour to recede from one another ….” That is, Newton's new aether embodied the very problem it seemed to explain, action at a distance in the form of a mutual repulsion between aethereal particles. Standing rarer in the pores of bodies than in free space, the aether caused the phenomena of gravity by its pressure.

The Opticks was in English, of course. Only a Latin edition could effectively reach the Continental audience, and in 1719 Newton published a second Latin edition that included the new Queries.