An Irishman's Diary

READER Jim Cooke has written asking if I know anything about a so-called "Old Vienna Club" that existed in Dublin during the second World War. No, unfortunately, I don't. And neither, it seems, does The Irish Timesarchive, even though the club's address – Pembroke Street – would have been fairly central to the paper's radar at the time.

Google Books throws up some references, however: including Walter J Moore's biography of the great Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was apparently a regular at the club. And of course, Schrödinger caused several blips on The Irish Timesradar, none bigger than when – via the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, where he worked – he was indirectly involved in a libel case against a certain famous columnist, whose centenary was celebrated yesterday.

By coincidence, I've been reading another biography of a physicist lately, called The Strangest Man. It's about Paul Dirac, the "British Einstein", who predicted the existence of antimatter and jointly won the 1933 Nobel Prize with the same Schrödinger.

Among its many fascinating details is this one, about a conference Dirac attended in Dublin in 1942: “The Irish Prime Minister Éamon de Valera, a trained mathematician who had helped bring Schrödinger to Ireland, took the two guests on a joyride around the local countryside, having met them [at the event]. Dirac had been amazed to see him there, attending lectures and taking detailed notes.” This was not long before De Valera’s famous speech about his ideal Ireland, “bright with cosy homesteads”, “fields and villages [. . .] joyous with the sounds of industry” and “the laughter of happy maidens”. But then again, maybe the obsessions of Dev the mathematician and Dev the champion of pastoralism were not as much at odds as they first seem.

Perhaps he was working on – if you’ll pardon the pun – a unified field theory. He certainly seems to have understood what the top scientific brains of the time needed. According to the book, Schrödinger tried to tempt Dirac to join him at the Dublin Institute and, in a war-time letter to Mrs Dirac, outlined the advantages thus: “There is plenty of food here – ham, butter, eggs, cake, as much as one wants.”

ANYWAY, back to the Old Vienna Club and Jim Cooke's query, which more particularly relates to a man named "Georg Joseph Bernfeld". The latter was a German-speaking immigrant who studied in Blackrock College and UCD, where he first gave his address as c/o the aforementioned club. He later became a maths/physics lecturer in Bolton St College of Technology, which is 100 years old this year. Jim is writing its history, hence the interest.

It seems likely that Bernfeld was Jewish and that he later followed a well-worn path for German Jewish emigrants, going from here to South Africa. The fountain of all knowledge about Jews in Ireland is a man called Stuart Rosenblatt, author of the superbly titled Yidiot's Guide to Irish Jewish Family Ancestry.And sure enough, he has been able to supply details, as have Blackrock College and UCD.

As for this paper’s archive, a man called GJ Bernfeld blazes a small trail there from 1945, when he won Dublin bridge tournaments on successive weeks, via his graduation with an MSc in 1946, and beyond. He was last noted in 1953 when, as Georg Josef Bernfeld and with an address at Kilcoole, Co Wicklow, being elected to the council of the Institute of Chemistry in Ireland.

Anyone with further information – especially anyone who was in the vicinity of the Old Vienna Club on the dates in question, or who knows anything about it – is asked to contact the incident room via e-mail to james_cooke@yahoo.com.

STILL ON THE subject of physics, and further to comments in a recent diary about James Joyce (October 1st), in which I suggested that the meaning of Finnegans Wakeremained "as elusive as the Higgs boson particle", an e-mail from Cambridge has offered partial enlightenment.

It comes from Prof WJ Stirling, who is no less a person that the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge University, that august institution where Dirac sat (in a different chair) before him. And it reminds me just how much Joyce is now mixed up in the epic Hadron Collider experiment at CERN.

Yes, I knew Finnegans Wakehad given the word "quark" to science, when it was adopted by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann to describe the fundamental particles he first postulated. But Prof Stirling also points out that when Higgs bosons decay, "as they are expected to after a very short period of time", they decay most often into quarks: "And it is these quarks that the experimenters are currently looking for at CERN".

So there you are. I’m not sure which of us can be more flattered: Joyce to be so implicated in one of the great scientific experiments of our time, or me to find out that the Irishman’s Diary is read by Cambridge professors of natural philosophy.

I still can't pretend to understand much about fundamental particles. Even so, I hereby predict that if and when any Higgs bosons are found, they will appear in the form of "quark's", complete with the missing apostrophe from Finnegans Wake. In the meantime, events have inspired me to make another attempt at reading that book. Early findings from the experiment are disturbing, however, and my money is on the CERN scientists to complete their mission first.