Erwin Schrodinger

Erwin Schrödinger (Born 12 August 1887 – Died 4 January 1961) was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian and naturalized Irish physicist who is widely cited as the father of quantum physics, best remembered for his 1935 thought experiment "Schrödinger’s Cat". In 2021, the Irish Times published an article with the headline "How Erwin Schrödinger indulged his ‘Lolita complex’ in Ireland", describing as a paedophile / pedophile.

Schrödinger kept a record of his sexual activity, which included sexual contacts with people below 18 years of age, in a diary he called Ephemeridae.

As of February 2023, the English wikipedia for Schrödinger uses information from at least one biographer in a deceptive and misleading way. The page states:

"At the age of 39, Schrödinger tutored 14-year-old "Ithi" Junger. As John Gribbin recounted in his 2012 biography of Schrödinger, "As well as the maths, the lessons included 'a fair amount of petting and cuddling' and Schrödinger soon convinced himself that he was in love with Ithi". Schrödinger assured Junger she wouldn't become pregnant, and seduced her at 17. She later became pregnant and had an abortion that left her sterile. Schrödinger left her soon after and moved on to other targets."

This passage may leave readers incorrectly believing that Schrödinger and Ithi had sexual contact when she was 14, that their relationship was not one of mutual willingness and romantic attraction, and even that Schrödinger tricked Ithi into sex and then felt no concern for her complications after an abortion of their child. Further, the use of victimological language is not shared by the biographer Gribbin, and less biased account can be found in his book:

"Itha was one of a pair of non-identical twin sisters whose mother was an acquaintance of Anny Schrödinger. [...] The maths lessons were a great success, with most of their tutor’s attention naturally being devoted to Itha, and both girls achieved the standard required to move on with their classmates when the next school term began. But as well as the maths, the lessons included “a fair amount of petting and cuddling,” and Schrödinger soon convinced himself that he was in love with Ithi [...] He talked to her about his scientific work and about his religious beliefs, wrote poetry for her, spent a skiing holiday with the two girls and their mother over Christmas 1927 [...]

Of course, the head of the young convent-school girl was turned by all the attention, and in due course she fell in love with him. But he was patient. It wasn’t until she was sixteen that he went into Ithi’s room in the middle of the night (during another skiing holiday) and told her how much he loved her; and not until just after her seventeenth birthday, in August 1929, that the relationship was consummated. The affair continued into the 1930s, with Schrödinger at one point seriously considering divorcing Anny to marry Ithi, and forms a backdrop which cannot be ignored to Schrödinger’s scientific life in the years following his discovery of wave mechanics" (bold by Newgon editors). [...]

the relationship with Itha developed to the point where she came to stay with Schrödinger in Berlin in the summer of 1932, while Anny was away. The result was pregnancy, and an abortion. Probably as a result of this, Itha, who would later marry an Englishman, suffered several miscarriages and was never able to have children." (pp. 131-132; pp. 157-158).

Carlo Rovelli notes in his book Helgoland (2021) that Schrödinger "always kept a number of relationships going at once – and made no secret of his fascination with preadolescent girls." In Ireland, Rovelli writes, he had one child each from two students. According to Bernard Biggar, Schrödinger was interested in pursuing a sexual/romantic relationship with his cousin, Barbara MacEntee, when she was 12 years old. Apparently, her uncle, the mathematician and priest Pádraig de Brún, advised Schrödinger to no longer pursue her, and Schrödinger later wrote in his journal that she was one of his "unrequited loves". MacEntee died in 1995, with the accounts emerging posthumously.