Caption: Group photograph at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin, Ireland in 1942. Front row left to right: Sheila Tinney (1918--2010), Padraig de Brun (1889--1960), Paul Dirac (1902--1984), Eamon de Valera (1882--1975), Arthur W. Conway (1875--1950), Arthur Eddington (1882--1944), Erwin Schroedinger (1887--1961), and Albert Joseph McConnell.
Erwin Schroedinger (1887--1961), is the discoverer of the Schroedinger equation, a key ingredient of quantum mechanics. He made the discovery during a skiing vacation during the 1925--1926 Christmas holiday season. Schroedinger was a serious person about vacations and he said this vacation was the only one in which he was so excited about physics that he worked during it.
Schroedinger is also famous for his book What Is Life? (1944) which was inspirational in the genetics.
In astronomy, Schroedinger has a remarkable claim to fame. He is the first person to notice the effective equivalence of the cosmological constant and constant dark energy. Schroedinger proposed this idea in 1918 (8 years before he became famous for the Schroedinger equation), but he did NOT use the modern term dark energy (see Cormac O'Raifeartaigh, Historical and Philosophical Aspects of the Einstein World, 2019, p. 13). His proposal seems to have had no historical impact, but it is a credit to his genius.
It is also remarkable that constant dark energy (though NOT by that name) was proposed 15 years before the first well-grounded proposal of dark matter by Fritz Zwicky (1898--1974) in 1933 (see Wikipedia: Dark matter: Early history). Zwicky coined the term dunkle materie.
Credit/Permission: ©
Cecil Keaveney (former Registrar
Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies),
1942
(uploaded to Wikimedia Commons
by User:Toploftical,
2017) /
CC BY-SA 3.0.
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File:DIAS_1942_photo.jpgl.
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