After five years of World War II, the end of the conflict and the defeat of Germany and Japan could be foreshadowed, so that the Irish ‘Emergency’ was becoming less anxious, although shortages of supplies and restrictions on travel were scarcely improved. schrödinger no longer confined his intellectual work to unified field theory and he began to take an interest in a variety of other problems, including some of a more philosophical nature. Physically, as he neared the age of sixty, he enjoyed good health, despite annual attacks of respiratory illness, aggravated by the dismal Irish climate and excessive smoking. When springtime came, Dublin broke out with great masses of yellow daffodils for sale at almost every corner and as he strolled down O'Connell Street Erwin exclaimed in joy at the sight of all the pretty girls who had emerged from winter coats to warm themselves in the occasional midday sunshine.

Statistics again

From January to March, 1944, schrödinger had returned to one of his first loves in science in a course of lectures on Statistical Thermodynamics at D.I. A.S. They were published in a small hectographed edition and later (1946) by the Cambridge University Press.1 In less than one hundred pages he covered the fundamentals of the subject with an insight and clarity that have never been equaled. The book is a distillation of his many years of creative work in the field, and one hears echoes of the passionate discussions of the twenties with Planck, Ehrenfest, and Einstein. He was pleased to learn that Max Born liked the little book on statistics, and wrote to him: ‘For I have no higher aim than to work out the beauty of science. I put beauty before science. Nitimur in vetitum [Ovid: we strive for that which is forbidden]. We are always longing for our neighbour's housewife and for the perfection we are least likely to achieve.’

During 1944 schrödinger exchanged several letters with Lajos Janossy (1912-1978), a Hungarian physicist who had attended some of his courses in Berlin, and who was now working on cosmic rays with Patrick Blackett in Manchester. He had become interested in a note by Janossy in Nature on the statistics of coincidences in Geiger counters - anything to do with statistical problems attracted his attention, and he would put aside even his general field theory to deal with it.