Quantum of solus – An Irishman’s Diary about Erwin Schrodinger, Eamon de Valera, and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies

An email about the 75th anniversary of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies reminds me of a controversy almost as old, and perhaps not unrelated – whether, in his famous 1943 speech, Eamon de Valera spoke of an ideal Ireland in which the maidens were “comely” or “happy”.

The two versions are about equally popular seven decades on. And in what should have been the last word on the matter, writing in this paper a few years ago, broadcaster John Bowman argued convincingly that in fact de Valera said both – a feat beyond most people, perhaps, but not a man of whom Lloyd George remarked that negotiating with him was like “trying to pick up mercury with a fork”.

The maidens were “comely” in the script issued to the press, whereas on the record (there really was a record – a 78rpm one, for HMV), the word used was “happy”. Bowman suspected the change was made with American listeners in mind, and he thought it probable Dev had said “comely” in the live broadcast, of which no recording exists.

But getting back to DIAS, it strikes me that the problem is not unlike the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat – which, in the celebrated thought experiment, could be simultaneously alive and dead, depending on the behaviour of a decaying atom vis-a-vis a flask of poison in the sealed box.

Schrodinger was highlighting illogicalities in the so-called “Copenhagen interpretation” of “quantum superposition”, by which the animal’s fate was unknowable until the opening of the box decided it.

But de Valera’s maidens are in an similarly ambivalent state. They will remain both “comely” and “happy” – not as great a problem as the cat’s, I admit — unless and until the original broadcast can be retrieved from the “ether” (as it used to be called, pre-Einstein).

It seems to me politically incorrect, even for 1943, that the taoiseach should have insisted on comeliness in his ideal maidens (not that their male counterparts, aka “athletic youth”, escaped judgment either). This was, after all, a speech stressing Ireland’s spiritual values.

Then again, it was an era in which the State’s banknotes were adorned by the big-eyed beauty of Hazel Lavery, as if to advertise to the world that there were plenty more where she came from (Chicago, ironically). And if a reputation for having comely women helped promote Ireland, Dev would not have been above mentioning it.

It would definitely have appealed to the likes of Schrodinger, who scandalously brought both a wife and mistress with him to Dublin, after Dev pulled out all the stops to get him here, and who still had plenty of loving left over for the local women.

It wasn’t their happiness Schrodinger was interested in – on the contrary, he acknowledged the widespread “distress” his philandering caused. But for all his conservatism, de Valera was happy to look the other way.

When another potential DIAS recruit, Paul Dirac, came to a conference in Dublin, the taoiseach went so far as to treat him and his wife to a “joyride around the local countryside” (that’s the phrase used by Dirac’s biographer, who presumably didn’t mean they were driving recklessly in a stolen car).

The maidens, comely or otherwise, may not have been a carrot in that case. Actual carrots might have worked, though. Tempting the couple to join him, Schrodinger boasted of wartime Ireland’s other attractions in a letter to Dirac’s wife: “There is plenty of food here – ham, butter, eggs, cakes, as much as one wants.”

DIAS was an extraordinary idea, really – comprising only two schools, one devoted to “Celtic Studies”, the other “Cosmic Physics”. As Neasa McGarrigle wrote on our science page yesterday, this reflected de Valera’s twin obsessions, “Irish and maths”. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, the institute spoke in a gutteral language while looking at the stars.

And it lends curious light to a detail I learned only recently – that among Schrodinger’s love affairs there was one with the wife of a leading Irish language scholar. They even had a child together, who, when the lovers split, was raised by the woman’s estranged husband.

Gosh. Maybe around the same time we find out whether de Valera said “comely” or “happy”, we’ll also discover that he planned the whole thing as an elaborate breeding project, to create a generation of Irish-speaking cosmic geniuses.

But I doubt we’ll hear about that during the series of anniversary lectures next month. Instead, talk titles include “The Emergence of Modern Irish” and “Celts in the Cosmos”. All events are free (see dias.ie for details) .