[Icarus]

Erwin Schrödinger was a really bad boy:

Quote:

The physicist Hermann Weyl noted that Erwin Schrödinger was at his most inspired when he was in the throes of a passionate affair. In truth, Schrödinger was a serial seducer who would convince himself he was in love as he moved from conquest to conquest, recording the details in his diary. In 1926, the year that he published his Nobel-prize winning monograph describing quantum – or particle – effects as a wave equation, he was chasing the neighbour’s 14-year-old daughter.

John Gribbin does not shy away from Schrödinger’s sex life in this biography. Indeed, he ends by interviewing an Australian physicist who learnt in his twenties that he was Schrödinger’s grandson. His Irish grandmother had been seduced while packing Red Cross parcels alongside Schrödinger’s mistress, Hilde March (the wife of Schrödinger’s ex-assistant and the mother of his illegitimate daughter, Ruth). Around the same time, Schrödinger got the well-known actress Sheila May pregnant and had to be warned off a friend’s 12-year-old niece. He later described his 17 years in Dublin as the happiest of his life.