Listen to this episode and find out more about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/box.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, exit pursued by language.
This is another installment of Telling Other Stories, the series about renaming, and it intersects with another recurring theme of the Allusionist: eponyms, and the recurring subtheme of eponyms being the problematic monuments of language.
Content note: this episode contains references to racism and eugenics, and to the sexual abuse of children. There is also a Category B swear, which feels insignificant compared to those other things I just warned you about.
Last episode I mentioned to get in touch if you have been involved with a renaming effort of some sort, like a product or mountain or foodstuff or museum, and several of you already have, with some renamings I could never even have conceived of! It’s very interesting, I’m very excited about what is to come. If you’d like to tell me about your renaming efforts or ones you’ve heard about, contact me via theallusionist.org/contact or a message on the socials.
On with the show.
HZ: In January 2022, a lecture theatre at Trinity College Dublin was renamed the Physics Lecture Theatre - which actually had already been its name for much of the 20th century. But in the 1990s it had been renamed the Schrödinger Lecture Theatre after the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger, he of cat in the box fame, who had lived and worked in Dublin for seventeen years. And at Trinity College in 1943 he had delivered the series of lectures entitled What Is Life which the following year became a book that was significant in genetics, he’s been called the Father of Quantum Mechanics - those are reasons the lecture theatre had been named in honour of him, as have some other buildings, and a crater on the far side of the moon. But the reason the TCD lecture theatre was denamed a year ago is because Erwin Schrödinger sexually abused several teenage and pre-teen girls, and groomed more.
Schrödinger sexual abuses and attempted abuses were known during his life and afterwards; he wrote about them in his own journal, they have been mentioned in biographies over the past few decades, sometimes euphemistically referred to as “Lolita complex”. So it wasn’t that nobody knew until recently; they definitely did know. And it wasn’t that they didn’t mind, either; for instance Schrödinger, at age 53, was warned off his pursuit of a 12-year-old by her cousin, who was Schrödinger’s good friend. Schrödinger described her as one of his, quote, “great lost loves.” These things weren’t secret and they weren’t fine; they just weren’t considered reason not to honour him with eponymous buildings and moon craters.
Trinity College Dublin’s petition, entitled “Rename Trinity's Schrödinger Theater after a non-pedophile please”, states:
“We can acknowledge the great mark Schrödinger has left on science through our study, and this petition does not wish to diminish the impact his lectures or ideas had in physics. However, it seems in bad taste that a modern college such as Trinity - one that holds lectures to both men and women, one that (hopefully) rejects the abuse of women, of young girls or, indeed, of anyone - would honour this man with an entire building.”
I asked for an interview with the physicist who led the renaming campaign at TCD’s Schrödinger lecture theatre, and they politely declined. Which is understandable. And it’s not a situation unique to Trinity College Dublin, not at all; but there's got to be more to renaming a building than just changing the sign... right?
SUBHADRA DAS: Do you know what? That was all that was involved.
HZ: What?!
SUBHADRA DAS: Yeah!
HZ: Oh, it's that easy?
SUBHADRA DAS: My name is Subhadra Das. I am a writer and historian and I tell stories about the history of science, specifically the science of race and the science of eugenics.
HZ: Sounds uplifting and fun.
SUBHADRA DAS: Yeah, it's so great. I love my life, it's wonderful.
HZ: Do you happen to know what the process is for renaming buildings that have been earlier named after people who you don't wanna name them after anymore?
SUBHADRA DAS: Yeah. For a few months, I was a member of a committee that was setting up the committee for the denaming and renaming of buildings at University College London - which is basically exactly what it sounds like. Universities love a committee. And it is a committee, it's an academic committee, it's got academic people on it, it's got professional services people on it, and they come together regularly to talk about particular instances. they meet on a monthly basis to discuss these things. And when I was a part of it, they were still putting their terms of reference together, which is about how do we deal with naming? If there's like a big money gift that comes to the university with the condition that a building has to be named according to someone. Those ones are actually a little bit trickier - or possibly a bit more straightforward, depending on how you wanna look at it - because, you don't have to, it's perfectly easy to take someone's money without having to put their name on something.
HZ: Good to know.
SUBHADRA DAS: Yeah, entirely; you don't have to do anything. You could easily not take their money as well, but universities are not particularly au fait with that course of action.
HZ: No, that doesn't make any sense!
SUBHADRA DAS: No, because it's all about the money. It's not about anything else, not about community, not about belonging, not making sure your students feel like they're comfortable in a space.
HZ: What kind of sort of responses do you find from people when you're like, "This building needs to be renamed?"
SUBHADRA DAS: Hmm. Well, it runs the gamut. There are the people who say: the buildings named after famous scientists who are problematic should have those names removed. So those people tend to be people of marginalized identities of whatever description, depending on who the person is, within the larger university. I think the people on the completely opposite position are: "No, they don't need to be renamed. These are important scientists and you can take your mimsy woke little snowflake feelings and go elsewhere." And I'm paraphrasing - that is not the point of view that I hold, and therefore I've caricatured that.
HZ: Yeah, I felt like you were in character in that moment.
SUBHADRA DAS: Thank you. It came naturally, which is scary.
HZ: We are all so close to saying that kind of thing. It just takes one building to test us.
SUBHADRA DAS: Or one position, right? Let me tell you the story of how the Galton Lecture Theater and the Pearson Lecture Theater and the Pearson Building at UCL were denamed. They were denamed, ie the names were taken off them first before they were renamed. So at UCL, the story was, it was students of colour, members of staff of colour, who were asking for the Galton Lecture Theater, the Pearson Lecture Theater and the Pearson Building to be renamed or have those names taken off them.
HZ: Francis Galton was a very influential and exalted scientist in the second half of the 19th century up until his death in 1911 - he invented weather maps, devised the still-used classification system for fingerprint patterns, and was a fervent proponent of scientific racism and eugenics, especially anti-Black eugenics. He even coined the term 'eugenics', and in 1904 founded a eugenics laboratory at UCL, it waas later called the Galton Laboratory. Galton also bequeathed money to UCL for the Galton Chair of Eugenics. The first recipient of this post was Galton's disciple Karl Pearson, who was a big deal in biometrics, statistics, and, again, eugenics. Both of these men, and their work on eugenics, are major parts of UCL's history, irrespective of whether buildings bear their names.
SUBHADRA DAS: I'm generally quite… I don't like to use the word 'liberal' anymore, because often liberal is code for neo-liberal, and I'm definitely not one of those; but I'm old school liberal, in terms of trying not to be really shit toward other people just for the sake of it.
HZ: That’s good.
SUBHADRA DAS: It's a good rule. It's a good rule. I try. And as a result, when I initially heard about calls to rename the Galton Lecture Theater - and I don't think many people knew actually even that there was also a Galton collection, which is the thing that I was in charge of at the time, from the early 20-teens - I was like, oh God, they're just gonna want to burn the museum collection. , you know, that's why you kind of instinctively, it's all, all of these things you end up kind of polemicizing positions that don't need to be polemicized. No one was saying burn anything. They were just like, "This guy was a racist. Can we not celebrate him by naming a space after him?" And I also was of the opinion that until the university was in a position where it could talk about its history of eugenics and its present of structural racism in a meaningful way, that name served a purpose, because it kept the argument in sight. It did strike me that if that name was taken off the lecture theater, it would suggest that all was right in the garden, and it definitely wasn't.
HZ: Right.
SUBHADRA DAS: I did change my mind about that. I moved on from that point of view. Eventually.
HZ: So at the time you were thinking if they do that, they'll think that's all there is to it. It's fixing it just by taking the name off, rather than the building being named that is a symptom of a whole lot of other things that are unfixed.
SUBHADRA DAS: Mm, exactly. And in a way, that would be slightly erasing history, because it's like taking the thing away without addressing the root cause of the problem.
HZ: It's a classic situation.
SUBHADRA DAS: Mm. Yeah!
HZ: Also this is a relatively minor point, but the Galton Lecture Theatre hadn’t even been named after Galton for very long.
SUBHADRA DAS: It was in 2010 - I think? - that the Galton Lecture Theatre was named in the Department of Statistics at UCL, when they moved to a new building. This wasn't even a historic name. You couldn't even argue that this was a so-called rewriting of history. The name turned up in a place that was brand new.
HZ: After many years of discussion and requests, and the publication of a two-year official inquiry, in the summer of 2020, UCL did dename three buildings that had been named after Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. The Galton lecture theatre is now lecture theatre 115, the Pearson lecture theatre is lecture theatre G22, and the Pearson building is known as the north-west wing. And you might think those are boring names, but numbers and ordinal directions don't tend to hold eugenicist views, so they're a safer bet than eponyms.
SUBHADRA DAS: And the names were changed, and it was super easy to do because there had been a committee on the renaming and renaming of buildings who had come up with the terms of reference. And they knew that this was coming. But yeah, for me it was a really monumental day to see people posting on Twitter photographs of a guy from the UCL estates team, screwdriver, took the plaque off the wall.
HZ: That's it?
SUBHADRA DAS: That's how you dename a building. It's not difficult.
HZ: What do you do with the plaque? Do you have to get the council to take it away, or can you just put it in a bin?
SUBHADRA DAS: I imagine it got put in a bin. I imagine that somebody, the moment you asked that question, was like, “Maybe you put it in the museum?” And my answer as a former museum curator is, no you don't. You don't need to archive everything.
HZ: Yeah, I don't think you need everything in a museum in order to remember it.
SUBHADRA DAS: It makes perfect sense, but what you've just said is hugely controversial.
HZ: Uh oh! There's also a crater on the far side of the moon named after Erwin Schrödinger, and it would be rather more effort to go there and unscrew the plaque and throw it in the bin. But denaming and/or renaming can be even more complicated than unscrewing a plaque on the moon.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: It struck me that it's easier to do that for a building, or like a bird, or a fish, than it is for an idea.
HZ: Is that because it's much harder to screw a sign onto the side of an idea than it is a building?
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Yeah, maybe; maybe I feel more uncomfortable about someone who has contributed to the sort of a fundamental aspect of a discipline, and in some cases ideas that are used every single day in the life of practitioners of that discipline. I don't know whether this is really an apt comparison, but it would be like if you'd invented a spanner: it's a tool that physicists use every single day; and not only that, that tool built other tools that physicists use. Schrödinger has like given us a tool that has enabled us to build other tools and machinery to understand the world and that is different from being like, “oh, you've been a really good boy. We're gonna give you a title and we're gonna give you a wing of this building and we're gonna give you a plaque on the wall.” That feels more like a conveyance of like the establishment.
But something that's so fundamental that probably physicists at least refer to Schrödinger’s equation like every day in their work, if they're academics: to take that away, to change that, like an equation or a theory, if someone goes like, “Well, no, we're not gonna use your name anymore…” Like Newton's Law of Motion, if people stopped using Newton's name, that would be very strange because he was so important in the way that we think about physics since the, when was that? 17th century?
HZ: You tell me, physics boy.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: I can't remember. I'm not a historian!
HZ: He's not, he's got a doctorate in quantum physics. He's my husband Martin Austwick, and where our work intersects is problematic science eponyms. Fun lunchtime chat around our place! “Could you pass the salt?” “What do you do about equations and theories that bear the names of harmful people?”
HZ: I think laypeople such as me, physics laypeople such as me, would associate Schrödinger with cats. But what is that about? Please explain to people such as me who do not have doctorates in quantum physics.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Yeah, sure. It's relatively easy to lay out what Schrödinger's cat is. It's a little more difficult to explain why it exists. Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment. It's never been done in practice because, as we will hear, it is highly unethical. The idea is that there's a sealed box, and in that sealed box there's a cat. And in that box is also some poison, a vial of poison, which is initially sealed. And whether that vial of poison remains sealed or is broken depends upon a radioactive atom. And that radioactive atom can, in the time that the cat’s in the box, either decay, and release a particle, which breaks the seal on the poison and kills the cat; or not decay, in which case the cat's fine. Now that in itself is not super interesting, just a sort of cruel experiment, but -
HZ: Why would you devise such a strange and horrible predicament for this cat?
MARTIN AUSTWICK: So this is the why part; this is a bit more complicated: Schrödinger was in part trying to illustrate the absurdity - seeming absurdity - of the way that we interpret quantum mechanics at an atomic level when you scale it up to things that we can see in the real world, like a cat, what we call a macroscopic level. And in quantum mechanics, that atom, if it's not observed, if it's not measured, can be simultaneously in the state of decay and not decay. So it can be two different things at the same time.
HZ: How? How does that work? I know that we all contain multitudes, but I didn't know that decayed and undecayed were possible multitudes to coexist.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: It’s because it's predicated on a fundamentally quantum mechanical process. In the early part of the 20th century, people's attempts to understand what the mathematics and observations of quantum mechanics were showing them led to these sorts of absurdities, because that radioactive atom can be in a indeterminate state - or a superposition of states - therefore the cat is as well. Because if we don’t know what state the atom is, then the cat is also in that indeterminate superposition. It's in some way, the outcome of the cat's life or death is entangled with the state of that atom. So the sort of thought experiment is, you only know if the cat is alive or dead when you open the box and you make an observation, because in quantum mechanics, on a microscopic level, that would be true of the atom itself.
HZ: Okay. So this is like when Britney Spears became famous, someone was eBaying an item that they said was her fart in a jar. But you would only know if there was a fart in the jar if you opened the jar and then there wouldn't be a far in the jar anymore anyway. Is that basically Schrödinger's cat in terms I can understand?
MARTIN AUSTWICK: It's related. The thing about quantum mechanics is you get into deep water very, very quickly, so getting your head around what is actually going on is really, really hard. I think if we go as far as to say that Schrödinger was trying to show the absurdity of a) quantum mechanic scaling up to a macroscopic level, and also the way that we interpret the mathematics and observations of quantum mechanics on a larger scale - it was kind of a provocation, I guess; but it's become a kind of pop culture shorthand for “Isn't quantum mechanics weird?” So people make jokes about Schrödinger's cat without really understanding what Schrödinger’s cat was poking at, which is something very deep and complex about the role of the observer in quantum mechanics. What does it mean to have a wave function that that isn't a superposition of observable states? And these sorts of questions.
HZ: I think a lot of people don't even know that Schrödinger’s cat is meant to be poking fun at quantum mechanics, Martin; I think a lot of people just think it's a strange thing involving a cat in a box that is either alive or dead, but certainly not both those states at once.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Superposition, yeah.
HZ: But this is not a show about quantum mechanics. If it were, then people will have been profoundly disappointed by the preceding 160-something episodes. Schrödinger also has an equation that bears his name for he received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933. In as cogent and non-patronizing but simplified terms as possible, can you just talk us through what that is, and more, why it's important?
MARTIN AUSTWICK: So historically, there'd been a lot of evidence up until the publication of Schrödinger's equation that had pointed towards a wave theory of matter.
So prior to that, there's some grey areas around this, but essentially people conceived of light as a wave and matter as a particle. Newton kind of thought of atoms as being billiard balls, I don't know quite how sophisticated his model of atoms was, but matter is blobs of stuff, light is waves of stuff. At the beginning of the 20th century, some experiments showed that in some senses, light was quantized, in other words, it was discrete packets of things; which led to some physicists to say, “If light can be a particle, does that mean matter, which is particulate, can also be a wave?”
So that was all of the sort of precursor to Schrödinger’s equation. And Schrödinger kind of figured out the equation that described that. And I guess you could think of Schrödinger’s equation as a class of equations that depends on different physical situations. But the solution to the Schrödinger's equation is something called the quantum wave function, which is absolutely fundamental to quantum mechanics as description of particles, matter, light, reality. The sort of wave mechanics which he helped to formalize is absolutely key to understanding quantum mechanics, at least in that era.
HZ: Okay. So without Schrödinger, if you subtract Schrödinger's influence, does that mean you have no quantum mechanics?
MARTIN AUSTWICK: I mean, I assume someone would've come up with it.
HZ: Like if you open the box and there's no Schrödinger in it.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: My take is that someone would've come up with it; but he did, like he was the person that made that leap. There were the other people before, like Louis de Broglie: Schrödinger described how matter could be like a wave; de Broglie described that matter could be a wave at all. And that was very controversial and he, I think, almost failed his PhD thesis, because that was in his PhD defense. He described a wave theory of matter and everyone was just like, “What are you talking about?” So it was pretty controversial at the time. So hopefully someone would've come along. And there was a guy that five years before Schrödinger, this guy Arthur Lunn, wrote a paper that essentially covered the same material that Schrödinger did later. He did the same work; I think he may have even gone a little bit further than Schrödinger. He tried to publish it in The Physical Review of Letters, which is the main physics journal then and now, and they rejected his paper. They considered it abstract, too farfetched, too mathematical.
HZ: Timing's just everything, isn't it?
MARTIN AUSTWICK: But that's it. Then three years later, Louis de Broglie did his work and demonstrated some of the way that matter could be wavelike, and that, I think, I have to assume, meant that Schrödinger's work was more accepted when he came to the same conclusions. So in some sense it's not Schrödinger's equation. Not only could someone else have come up with it had Schrödinger not existed; someone else did.
HZ: This is something that comes up again and again with eponyms - it's Stigler's law of eponyms, that the person who deserves the eponyms is not the person who has the eponyms, in a lot of cases. So you could make the argument that no one deserves the eponyms because there are so many people involved. It seems weird to put one name on it, or you could say that other people's names deserve to be on it more.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: I mean, I feel, I feel nuanced about that, because I think fundamentally, like I just said, I think someone would have done it, but he did do it.
And that was an important leap and an important contribution that he made. And you can think about someone like Albert Einstein who had made hugely fundamental contributions to three different branches of physics in the start of the 20th century. Now, obviously he collaborated with people and he was informed by the intellectual milieu of his time and so on, and read other physicists’ papers. No one exists in a vacuum.
HZ: I know that from science.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Yeah. Not for very long. But to say that Einstein didn't make a huge, huge contribution - you might say maybe it would be three different people that made the same contributions to physics that Einstein did in that period, but he still did make that contribution. So I feel a little complicated about that. I do think someone would've come up with the theory, but when and who… and it was still Schrödinger that did the work and made the intellectual leap and made a real contribution to physics.
HZ: But other people had made the intellectual leap and done the work.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Yeah, true.
HZ: So that's the problem with the one eponym thing. But also Einstein: Einstein is an interesting example because the theory of relativity is not an eponymous thing.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: You don't really say Einstein’s Law… He does have some things named after him, and there are Einstein equations in laser physics, actually; interestingly, it just shows what a diverse set of contributions he made. But yeah, it's not typically Einstein's equations of special relativity. You just call it the special theory of relativity.
HZ: He doesn't need an eponym brag, he's Einstein.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: He’s bloody Einstein!
SUBHADRA DAS: There are plenty of principles in science that don't have anyone's names associated with them at all. The one that I think is my favorite in this area is the many worlds theory, so the multiple universes and the potential for multiple universes. The guy that came up with that was a scientist called Hugh Everett. Possibly for me, the most interesting thing is that his son was Mr. E out of Eels.
HZ: Yes, and has written a very interesting memoir about that and his dad.
SUBHADRA DAS: Yes, absolutely beautiful TV documentary about it as well. But no one calls it, for example, the Everett many worlds theory. No one calls it the Everett Theory. And I think that's kind of to do with just how it's completely cultural, actually. The many worlds theory is not controversial in the world of physics, but it is bizarre in a way that even physicists seem to be able to not quite handle. It strays into aspects of philosophy that they are clearly uncomfortable with. And as a result, the thing is just called what it is, there's not a person associated with it. It's completely easy to take something that was named for someone - so a good example of this is Pearson's chi-square test, which is a statistical test to check the validity of statistical studies - is the best that I'm gonna be able to explain it to you - and a lot of people just call it the chi-square test. They wouldn't call it a Pearson test. So it's easy enough to change.
HZ: What do you think is the difficulty of removing Schrödinger's name from Schrödinger's equation and Schrödinger's cat? Does Schrödinger's cat have a more official name than Schrödinger's cat?
MARTIN AUSTWICK: No. Schrödinger's cat is just called Schrödinger's ca. And the difficulty with that is that I think it has impact on the public consciousness.
HZ: You could say “cat in the box”. And a lot of people would understand that - unless they thought, “My cat likes to sit in a box, because cats like sitting in boxes.”
MARTIN AUSTWICK: You could call it the quantum cat, or something like that.
HZ: Quantum cat! A really, really tiny cat.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Exactly. Yeah. It's a very discreet cat.
SUBHADRA DAS: My experience is that a lot of scientists get quite annoyed when when things like Schrödinger's cat creep into just general speak. Because what happens through that process is that non-scientists, those of us who don't understand the intricacies of quantum electrodynamics and how it all works - I mean, who doesn't know what that is?
HZ: Born knowing.
SUBHADRA DAS: There's the other reason why it was so popular was because it's a phenomenally elegant way of thinking about a situation of trying to describe how one thing can be in two supposedly opposite states at the exact same time. And ideas like the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, which sits kind of similarly alongside that: usually scientists get pissed off by the fact that those of us who don't know what that thing actually is, throw those names around as if it's something that we do understand. You get people who are, you know, the far end of the very woo spectrum of everything is wavelengths and vibrations, and they're like, “Yes, and Heisenberg!” on top of that. So fair play that people who do understand what those things actually mean would be angry about that. But again, I think that particular cat is now out of the bag.
HZ: Out of the box.
SUBHADRA DAS: Out of the box, out of the box. But what I think I'm saying about that, ironically, is you can't have it both ways. Either be annoyed about the fact that the rest of us get it wrong; or take on board the fact maybe it's your responsibility as a scientist to tell stories in more compelling ways, so that people like me don't get it wrong when I'm doing some element of science communication, because I enjoy how a metaphor works. I think there are a lot of scientists and there are a lot of people who work in the public communication of science who throw a metaphor around really without having understand it perfectly. Or, in point of fact, the metaphor kind of takes over from their point of thinking.
HZ: OK, so we’ve got ‘quantum cat’ instead of ‘Schrödinger’s cat’; is there something else you could call Schrödinger's equation?
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Um, yeah. You could call it the quantum mechanical wave equation, or the wave function equation, I guess, or the time evolution wave equation. I mean, there's slightly different versions of Schrödinger’s equation. So you could probably give it a name that is descriptive. The general field that he was working in when he created it was kind of called wave mechanics, so you could call it the wave mechanic equation or something like that.
HZ: Which I think for some people would be easier to spell than ‘Schrödinger’.
HZ: People seem to have a lot of trouble with things they perceive to be erasing history, and yet I also think they haven't considered all the things that we have not taught anyone deliberately in history, because of our choices about what is allowed permanence.
SUBHADRA DAS: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there are other things in science that are named for people. So it's not just buildings - it's really easy to change the name of the building. I think it would be just as easy to take the names off principles and things in science, because if you look again at the ways in which those names are applied, there is an inherent sexism in the way that that's been done. If you go look up the Wikipedia list of things named after famous scientists, good luck finding a woman's name on there. I'm sure there is - I tried to do it and got bored halfway through.
HZ: The eponym for the scientific achievements of women being credited to men is the Matilda Effect. If you’ve attended one of the performances of the Allusionist live show Your Name Here, you’ve witnessed me and Martin performing a musical number about the Matilda Effect, it’s very lengthy because there are so many examples.
SUBHADRA DAS: The naming of buildings is an overt commemoration. You can't read that in any way other than “We are celebrating this person. We think that they're great. We think that they are big. We think that they are instrumental and influential in our field. We want to celebrate them. We're bigging them up.” But I think the thing that you and I are reacting to when we see those things is actually the greater injustices in our society, and the greater inequality in how the power is aligned. Those are the ways in which that power is manifested. Those are the symptoms. But the disease in our society is something different.
And to me that's the real crux of this whole idea, is that we can talk about commemoration and we can talk about science and the way the science culture works, but ostensibly it is the same story as any individual that's held up on a platform: if they think they're special and above the law, they behave accordingly.
HZ: I keep coming back to the fact that other people had also done this work and haven't had the credit for it. And because their name's not on it, it just keeps reiterating this idea that Schrödinger was the big daddy of this concept -
MARTIN AUSTWICK: The big daddy of physics.
HZ: - Big Daddy Quantum pPhysics.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: But that's an argument for removing all eponyms, not just his.
HZ: Yes, it is.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: That's fine. But that's not a specific reason for saying we can make a special case for Schrödinger, because he was a bad person.
HZ: No, but when people are excusing keeping Schrödinger on things because you don't want to honour someone who had his history of abuse, I think the counter-argument that you should attribute the work to the right person, that also isn't really being borne out by calling it Schrödinger ,since there's multiple people who maybe ought to be having the attribution and haven't. And by keeping just Schrödinger’s name on it, it's perpetuating this idea that he did everything solo, and it was only him that had the idea - or his idea was more important than the other ideas, rather than the one that was just right place, right time.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: But his is not the only important idea in quantum mechanics, right? So like you could sort of argue a lot of the people, the other very creative and smart people around him, you have things named after them, like Bohr and Wigner and Heisenberg and you know, all these other people, Einstein. There were a lot of eponyms in quantum mechanics, so it's an important one, but it's not like it's the only eponym in QM. There was some plurality just by virtue there's a lot of stuff named after people in the sciences in general and in quantum mechanics in particular.
HZ: Yeah. But just so much of it is named after the wrong people, or named after bad people, or bad and wrong people.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Yeah, maybe; but is that the majority? I assume a lot of these physicists were just, like, fine. Like, I mean, they may have had privilege, but that doesn't mean that they were abusers like Schrödinger, or Nazi collaborators or whatever.
HZ: But even if Schrödinger had been a man who didn't harm other people, maybe he didn't deserve the eponym as much as he's had it based on the work, because there were other people who have been written out of this because his name is the name on it.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: So should we give it to like Arthur Lunn who did it five years earlier
but he got robbed of that honour by scientific orthodoxy just not accepting the ideas that he was presenting?
HZ: I think maybe replacing one eponym with another eponym is not wholly addressing the problems that eponyms repeatedly present.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: I feel like it's a quantum mechanical domino rally: once you knock off Schrödinger, you're like, well, why would we call any of those things…? Which is fine. Like, I don't have a huge… I do think eponyms are a way that we recognize people's contributions, and the fact that they're not a perfect way to do that, does that mean we should just get rid of them?
HZ: Yeah! Because we could. Like you've said, we could call this equation something else.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: They are quite ungainly. Schrödinger’s equation, okay, that's not a short name; but, you know, wave mechanical differential equation is also a little dry.
HZ: It's a little dry, but at least it's not got sex abuse embedded in it. I take drabness over that.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Yeah, I think that's fair.
SUBHADRA DAS: My experience of talking with some - not all - geneticists, I think the reason why they hold onto these names, is that there is a kind of a hand to God aspect to this, which is that the people who are high up in genetics departments now are like the third generation: they were taught by the people who were taught by Galton and Pearson and R.A. Fisher, and all those great - ‘great’I hope you can hear the quote marks in my voice - racist eugenicist scientists. There is a direct connection between these people and those people through the generations of scholarship. And in a way, I think the metaphor of the gene is the thing that they find really difficult, because their ideas - I think they think about their scientific ideas as being genetic as well, inherited from these great minds. And so therefore, if we criticize those great minds - which we responsibly really should be doing given the views that they held - suddenly their political position in the university is threatened, but also, you know, their ontological position is threatened because everything that is the basis of their research suddenly comes into question. I get that it's an existential crisis. I just don't have much sympathy for people who would prefer to hold on to that particular existence in the absence of something else.
HZ: Yes, I think that is so common, isn't it, that people take requests for change as personal criticism and they become incredibly defensive, and it makes things worse.
SUBHADRA DAS: It really does. Yeah. And yet people kind of want to hold onto it in a way. People like me who are seen as calling out the racist histories of science: we're not doing it for the fun of it. It's because we understand the potential value of science within our society. It's just that this house is built on rotten foundations, you know? Why would you want to keep building on them?
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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
quadrivium, noun: a medieval university course comprising arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. Origin Latin, literally ‘the place where four roads meet’.
Try using ‘quadrivium’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. You heard from Subhadra Das and Martin Austwick. Subhadra Das is a writer and historian: you can preorder her book Uncivilsed: Ten Lies that Made the West, and she has also made three podcast series about eugenics, which are What Does Eugenics Mean To Us?, Living With Eugenics, and Bricks + Mortals, a history of eugenics told through buildings.
Martin Austwick is a retired physicist and current musician and songwriter; you’ve heard his compositions on every episode of the Allusionist, you heard me ripping it out of his doctorate in No Title, the live show and episode; and you can hear his songs via palebirdmusic.com and on Bandcamp etc. His podcasts include Neutrino Watch and Song By Song, about the music and films of Tom Waits. I’ll link to Martin and Subhadra’s work at theallusionist.org/box.
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