In December 1947 I was invited to a small conference in the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies. The Dublin Institute had been founded by the Irish government before World War II. The Irish saw the plight of Jewish and liberal scientists in Central Europe at that time. Eamon de Valera, the Taoiseach, a mathematician, saw he could help some of the scientists, and his own country, at the same time. So the Institute was started, with two schools, one for Theoretical Physics and one for Celtic Studies. Both have been very successful.

The Theoretical Physics school was established around two of the leaders of the early days of quantum mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger and Walter Heitler. After World War II de Valera decided to extend his very successful Institute by the addition of a School of Cosmic Physics, comprising three sections, meteorology, astronomy and cosmic radiation. He asked Lajos Janossy, another refugee who had spent World War II working in P. M. S. Blackett's laboratory in Manchester, to take charge of the cosmic ray section. Janossy had been one of my supervisors when I took my Master's degree at Manchester and he asked me would I be interested in the Assistant Professorship. So I went to Dublin to be inspected (and to inspect) as well as to attend the small conference.

One of the leading speakers at the conference was George Rochester, my other supervisor. He showed two Wilson cloud chamber pictures that he and Clifford Butler had taken with Blackett's magnetic cloud chamber.