REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON GENERAL RELATIVITY AND GRAVITATION
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT MCALEESE AT THE OPENING OF THE 17th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON GENERAL RELATIVITY AND GRAVITATION, RDS
Dia dhíbh a chairde go léir.
Ladies and gentlemen,
I am delighted to welcome each one of you to Ireland for the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation. You come to us from forty-eight countries across the world and I extend to you the traditional Irish céad míle fáilte - a hundred thousand welcomes. It is a singular honour that Ireland has been chosen as the venue for this prestigious conference, which brings so many great brains and imaginations together from the fields of general relativity, gravitation, cosmology and astrophysics. Here in Dublin I hope you will be inspired, challenged and renewed in your vocation as scientific thinkers and researchers.
I have my dear old friend and former Trinity College colleague Professor Florides and the organising committee to thank for their kind invitation. I have myself to thank for daring to say yes and to present myself as a scientifically illiterate lawyer to such an audience. When I first met Professor Florides thirty years ago I knew nothing about relativity and gravitation. I still don’t - my fault, not his!
Back in the early 1970’s the then third President of Ireland was a mathematician Eamon de Valera and he would surely have been comfortable in this company for it was he who instigated the setting up, in 1938, when he was Prime Minister, of the Irish institution most particularly associated with developments in the areas of relativity and gravitation - the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, and more specifically the School of Theoretical Physics within that Institute. Erwin Schrödinger was the first Senior Professor and Director of the School of Theoretical Physics and he was also the first of many distinguished foreign physicists and mathematicians to work there, among them people of the stature of Cornelius Lanczos, Walter Heitler and Paul Dirac. And of course the School was also home to a number of notable Irish scientists, including Lochlainn O'Raifeartaigh and J L Synge, nephew of our distinguished playwright, J M Synge. By coincidence it was here in the Royal Dublin Society that the scientific Synge was awarded the Boyle medal for excellence in science in 1972 and the School, along with the excellent mathematics and physics departments of our other academic institutions, has had an impressive record of contributions to the developments in theoretical physics which took place in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Apart from his love of mathematics, Eamon de Valera was motivated to establish the Institute for Advanced Studies by his huge admiration for one of Ireland’s greatest mathematicians, Sir William Rowan Hamilton. He died of course before the development of relativity and quantum theory but his work underpins much of modern theoretical physics. Among his many contributions to the development of mathematics was his discovery of quaternions, the fundamental formula which came to him as he was walking along the Royal Canal with his wife on his way to a meeting in the Royal Irish Academy, not far from here. For the rest of us mortals who generally grumble about the weather or discuss what we are having for tea on such walks that marital ramble is one of life’s great mysteries nearly as big as relativity itself. Even more intriguing was Hamilton’s excitement which provoked him to carve the formula with a knife on a stone of Brougham Bridge as he was passing. For classy, upmarket graffiti I think that one is hard to beat. I doubt if any graffiti artist since has achieved the same level of erudition.
Your presence here today is evidence of and vindication of Ireland’s long and proud yet often overlooked tradition of contribution to the sciences. So often when the name of Ireland is mentioned we think first of literature, of Joyce, Yeats, Beckett, Shaw, Wilde, Heaney. Yet it is vital that we see our scientific heritage as a proud part of our broad cultural heritage and that each generation is challenged to make its own contribution, to add the fruits of its own genius to that living story, that endless search for fresh insight and understanding.
It was Einstein who said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Arguably the greatest scientist of all time, he recognised that imagination is as important to progress and intellectual provocation in the sciences as in the arts.
There is no doubt that it was inspired, imaginative thinking that brought you to Dublin to try and resolve among other things such matters as the inconsistency, if not contradiction, between the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics – after all we in Ireland have some notable experience in reconciling the apparently irreconcilable! You couldn’t have come to a better place. I hope the legendary Irish luck will make all the difference to your deliberations and the even more legendary hospitality will not inhibit the clear heads your work obviously requires.
I am sure that this conference will be the great success its organisers have not only hoped for but have worked so hard for. They deserve great credit and thanks but their real reward will come in the enjoyment, the fulfilment and the memories you take home with you from Dublin and in the seeds of powerful scientific discourse which will be the legacy of these days in Ireland. Enjoy it all.
It gives me great pleasure now to declare this conference officially open.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.