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Schrödinger Was a Pedophile
Let’s stop glorifying a man who sexually abused children
In December 2021, a petition began making the rounds asking that Trinity College Dublin rename its Erwin Schrödinger Theatre after “a non-pedophile, please.” The petition was written in response to a recent Irish Times article which revealed the famous physicist to be “a serial groomer of girls” who abused at least four children, aged 12–17, as well as several women.
You might be thinking: wait, the guy with the dead/not-dead cat? Yes, I do mean that Dr. Erwin Schrödinger. Best known in popular culture from shows like The Big Bang Theory as the guy who proposed locking a cat in a box with a vial of poison, Schrödinger turns out to have been an even bigger creep who repeatedly pursued children, groomed his young students into sexual relationships, and got a 17-year-old girl pregnant when he was 45.
If this is the first you’re hearing of Schrödinger’s abuses, you’re not the only one. As a student at Trinity College myself (albeit in the humanities, not the physics department), I find it terribly shocking that the school, which purports to be a champion of young women and committed to diversity and equity, would name a lecture theatre after a known pedophile and rapist. The worst part is, although this may be the first time that the general public has heard about it, Schrödinger’s sexual abuse has been a well-known “open secret” for decades.
Schrödinger died in 1961, leaving behind a large number of diaries keeping track of both his work and his personal life. In them, he describes how he groomed his fourteen-year-old student, Itha Junger, into a sexual relationship. She became pregnant by Schrödinger at 17 and underwent an illegal abortion that, due to complications, caused her to become permanently sterilized. In his biography of Schrödinger titled, Schrödinger, Life, and Thought (1989), Walter Moore describes how Schrödinger became “infatuated” with a 12-year-old girl named Barbara de Brún shortly thereafter. Schrödinger agreed not to pursue the child after a family member “raised concerns” — Barbara was the niece of a family friend — but he wrote in his diaries that she was “among the unrequited loves of his life.” He went on to rape a 26-year-old woman who also became pregnant.
