Schroedinger in Dublin: A Novel

Ever since discovering as a science student that the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Erwin Schroedinger spent seventeen years in Ireland from 1939 to 1956, Michael Foley has been fascinated by this encounter between a sexually promiscuous much-travelled polymath and a backward, insular Catholic country. When researching Schroedinger, he was surprised to discover that he had many ideas and interests in common with Schroedinger (though not the womanising), including a disregard for discipline boundaries (Schroedinger won his Nobel for quantum physics but also worked on cosmology and microbiology), and an interest in poetry and Eastern philosophy. But Foley's conclusive discovery was that Schroedinger knew the Irish writers, Flann O'Brien and Patrick Kavanagh, both of whom Foley has always loved. The possibility that he could give a voice to Schroedinger made attempting the novel Schroedinger in Dublin exciting, and the opportunity to have O'Brien and Kavanagh as major characters made it irresistible. One of the novel's strong points is showing the Irish dilemma during WWII: having to choose between two 'enemies', the British and the Nazis from an emphatic point of view. This is a novel not only about quantum mechanics but about life itself. Dublin is put under a spotlight through Schroedinger's foreign eyes. His philosophical observations are spot on, and his constant questioning of issues is a lovely and scientifically inspired aspect of the story. A gripping novel with a poignant ending.

About the Author :
Michael Foley was born in 1947 in Derry, Northern Ireland, and educated at St Columb's College and Queens University, Belfast, where he took degrees in Chemistry and Computer Science and did research in Computer Science. In 1972 he moved to London, where he still lives. After a career in teaching, culminating in twenty three years at the University of Westminster lecturing in Information Technology, he retired in 2007 to devote himself to writing. His first poems were published in 1969 in The Honest Ulsterman, a magazine he went on to edit with Frank Ormsby, and his first prose was published in a satirical column in the magazine Fortnight, which also serialised his first novel, The Passion of Jamesie Coyle. After retirement from teaching he wrote his first non-fiction book, The Age of Absurdity. It was translated into eight languages and became an international bestseller. Since, Michael Foley has published three other novels and non-fiction books and five collections of poetry, including New and Selected Poems, Blackstaff Press 2011. His most recent non-fiction was Isn't This Fun? Investigating the Serious Business of Enjoying Ourselves, Simon & Schuster 2016, and The Whole Thing, a long poem, was published by Mica Press in April 2023.