169. The Box
The Allusionist
Helen Zaltzman
4.7 • 3.8K Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2023
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Erwin Schrödinger is one of the "fathers of quantum mechanics". He also sexually abused children. Trinity College Dublin recently denamed a lecture theatre that had been named after him - but his name is still on an equation that won the Nobel Prize for physics. And a cat.
Writer and historian Subhadra Das recounts how and why you rename a university building, and retired physicist Martin Austwick considers that renaming an eponymous equation or theory might be more difficult than unscrewing a sign from a wall.
Content note: this episode contains references to racism and eugenics, and to the sexual abuse of children. There is also a Category B swear.
Find out more about this episode and get extra information about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/box, where there's also a transcript.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the illusionist, in which I, Helen Zoltzman, exit pursued by language. This |
| 0:10.1 | episode is another installment of telling other stories, our series about renaming stuff, |
| 0:16.3 | and it intersects with another recurring theme of the illusionist, epinimps, and the recurring |
| 0:21.5 | sub-theme of epinimps being the problematic monuments of language. Content note, this |
| 0:26.8 | episode contains references to racism and eugenics, and to the sexual abuse of children. There |
| 0:32.7 | is also a category B-sware, which fills insignificant me compared to those other things I just want |
| 0:38.9 | to you about. Last episode I mentioned to get in touch if you have been involved with a renaming |
| 0:44.2 | effort of some sort, like a product or mountain or food, stuff or museum, and several of you already |
| 0:50.0 | have, with some renaming I never even could have conceived of. Very interesting, very excited |
| 0:56.4 | about what's to come. If you would like to tell me about your renaming efforts or ones you've |
| 1:00.8 | heard about, contact me via theillusionist.org-contact or send me a message on the socials. On with the show. |
| 1:18.2 | In January 2022, a lecture theatre at Trinity College Dublin was renamed the Physics |
| 1:24.0 | Lecture Theatre, which actually had already been its name for much of the 20th century, |
| 1:28.4 | but in the 1990s it had been renamed the Shrodinger Lecture Theatre after the Nobel Prize winning |
| 1:34.3 | physicist Irwin Shrodinger, he or of Kat in the Box fame, who had lived and worked in Dublin for |
| 1:40.2 | 17 years. And at Trinity College in 1943, he had delivered the series of lectures entitled What is |
| 1:46.7 | Life, which the following year became a book that was very significant in genetics. He's been |
| 1:51.6 | called the Father of Quantum Mechanics. Those are reasons the lecture theatre had been named in |
| 1:56.4 | honor of him, as have some other buildings, and a crater on the far side of the moon. |
| 2:01.8 | But the reason the TCD Lecture Theatre was denamed a heroico is because Irwin Shrodinger |
| 2:07.7 | sexually abused several teenage and preteen girls and groomed more. Shrodinger's sexual |
| 2:14.4 | abuses and attempted abuses were known during his lifetime and afterwards. He wrote about them in |
... |
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