De Valera, Schrödinger, and Why Ireland Will Not Attract anti-Trump Scientists

Let’s imagine, in one of Erwin Schrödinger’s parallel universes, I was charged with providing the brain power for a Max Planck Institute based in an Ireland at peace with the world and with itself. 

No problem. 

I would charter a Jumbo jet, pack it with Iranian STEM graduates, fly it to Dublin, and take things from there. My silly example is important as Germany funds its own Max Planck Society to the tune of €2 billion a year and its society is named after the great Max Planck, who is germane not only to this article but to the idiotic plans the European Union has to recreate the intellectual greatness of Planck’s Germany by poaching fifth rate Americans wishing to flee Trump’s America.

The Guardian newspaper informs us that tiny, inconsequential Ireland wishes to entice, on the cheap, of course, American hotshots from Trump’s America to the Emerald Isle because Trump has made America ‘a cold place for free thinkers.’ Irish Minister James Lawless, who is putting his name to this madness, cited Ireland’s success in enticing Erwin Schrödinger to Dublin on the eve of the Second World War, before going on about some rampant Nazi style book burning epidemic currently raging in the United States.

This madcap Irish proposal to recruit top-shelf American researchers, who are keen to escape Trump’s freeze on funding frivolous academic research and accompanying travel jaunts, is plagiarised from that of Belgium’s Vrije Universiteit Brussel, France’s Pasteur Institute and similar European institutions. 

That is to say, Europe’s Democratic fifth columnists are opening their cheque books to write derisory cheques that will attract only those worthless windbags previously discussed here and here, whom Uncle Sam rightly rejects and whom equally worthless windbags like von der Leyen and Kallas think will make the same sort of contribution to their war efforts as Werner von Braun and the Operation Paperclip lads did to Hitler’s. 

Although there have been outstanding American physicists, such as Steven Weinberg, to whose alma mater we shall return, the fact of the matter is that the hot shots of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army go to Tehran and not to Texas to brush up on all matters pertaining to missiles and drones. Though it may not be top of the class when it comes to endless LGBT parades, when it comes to STEM research, Tehran, with its Chinese compañeros, mirrors Max Planck’s top shelf Berlin. They can do the hard sums.

Languishing in British captivity shortly after Germany’s surrender, Planck and his buddies heard that the Yanks had nuked Japan; they couldn’t believe it, as they had found the necessary calculations to develop the bomb beyond even their abilities. Planck, for all his unmatched genius, could not figure out that the Yanks’ Manhattan Project had the human resources of some 500,000 scientists the Third Reich’s physicists could not even dream about.

And nor could Erwin Schrödinger, who spent the War years holed up in neutral Dublin with his wife and mistress, and where he delivered some of the most important papers ever in the field of theoretical physics. Schrödinger’s Irish sojourn was the result of some of the most audacious pieces of head-hunting by Irish Prime Minister, Éamon de Valera, no mean mathematician himself, who wished Schrödinger to recreate Max Planck’s academic Vienna by the banks of the Liffey.

Had Hitler not put Schrödinger’s life in mortal danger and had Oxbridge turned a blind eye to Schrödinger’s domestic ménage à trois, then De Valera’s dreams might have come to naught. Although Schrödinger described Ireland as “the only place in the world where a person like me would be able to live comfortably and without direct obligations, free to follow all his fancies”, he returned to Austria in 1956, when the madness of the Hitler years was beginning to recede.

Though Ireland retained Sir Ernest Walton and some other bright sparks, it is unlikely that Ireland, unlike Steinberg’s University of Texas at Austin, will ever be a home from home for a genius like Schrödinger again. That is because the days of lone geniuses like Schrödinger are now an anachronism and, as with the Manhattan Project, physics demands huge pools of talented geniuses and even bigger pools of money to drive forward their research.

And that brings us back to Steinberg’s University of Texas at Austin, which is the perfect exemplar of university funding as it gets roughly a third of its income from students’ fees, another third from research grants and another third from alumni donations which, in its case, depends on the fortunes of its football team, one of America’s best. There is absolutely no way an Irish university or any European university can compete with that.

If we move on to research, the University of Southampton’s engineering department gets big funding from Rolls-Royce and the Royal Navy, to which it is attached. And, though bully for them in that, there is too much piggybacking on those contracts to make them viable over the longer term. Check out their vastly overpriced MBA, which I previously taught corporate finance in (as well as to Rolls-Royce engineers and fighter pilots) and see their false claims that it opens careers for actuaries (whom I also taught) and other tough areas MBAs have no connection with.

MBAs are, at heart, crude money-making exercises for the universities involved, and far too many British universities churn them out with no quality control for that reason, and for that reason alone. Indeed, without Chinese and other Asian students doing dubious master’s degrees, most British universities would be bankrupt as they do not get the donations or research grants the University of Texas at Austin and similar places get.

By and large, it is fair to say that, when it comes to serious, cutting-edge STEM research, Europe and much of America are not in the race, and autocrats like von der Leyen (plagiarised her thesis) and Kallas are not going to get them even to the starting line.

As things currently stand, students are reporting lecturers for using CHATGBT to write their lectures and even to give individual feedback. Although lecturers have been delivering subpar lectures for decades, the key point is that students are peripheral to university life, where the real action is writing research papers, promoting one’s sex playmates, and going on overseas junkets.

Although the world is much better for the handful of papers Einstein, Schrödinger and Steinberg wrote, the reality is that most others have been free booters, who palm off sub-par tripe as having some great intrinsic value and it is within that framework that Europe’s headhunting for Biden’s droppings in the United States should be viewed.

After I gave up teaching at UCD’s Michael Smurfit School of Business, my former colleagues were in the news for exposing Gary Santry, another American fraud, who had taken the university for a very expensive ride. Add in Nigerian grifter Dr Ebun Joseph and Israeli racist grifter Ronit Lentin, and Schrödinger is the exception proving the rule that Irish universities are incapable of doing due diligence.

All things considered, then, the way to make the universities of Ireland, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands great again is not to import American rejects but to cut out the ubiquitous, neo-modernist LGBT and DEI dross peddlers from kindergartens and primary schools upwards. To make Irish, French, Belgian and Dutch academic labourers worthy of their keep and, as things currently stand, to look to chartering planes full of Iranian and Chinese STEM graduates, who can do the hard sums because they have something more than American, Nigerian and Israeli DEI/LGBT mantras between their ears.