towards the end of her life. Michael Maclagan, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Trinity College, herald, and Lord Mayor of Oxford 1970–71, lived for many years at No. 20, Tolkien's former home. The diplomat Sir Julian Bullard (1928–2006) lived in Northmoor Road during his retirement. Three Nobel Prizewinners are associated with Northmoor Road. The eminent Austrian quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger and his wife Anny lived there from 1933 to 1936. Schrödinger previously held a Professorship at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. He was not Jewish but was alarmed by the rise of anti-Semitism and accepted the offer of a Fellowship at Magdalen College Oxford to escape from Nazi Germany. Initially, they stayed at 12 Northmoor Road, and it was there that Schrödinger learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Paul Dirac from Cambridge. Early in 1934 the Schrödingers moved into 24 Northmoor Road, two doors from the Tolkiens, where they lived until Schrödinger left in 1936 to take up a Professorship at the University of Graz, Austria. In 1935, while he was living at No 24, Schrödinger wrote his famous "Schrödinger's cat" paper, criticising the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which proposed that the exact state of a single atom was indeterminate until observed. Schrödinger's thought experiment imagined a cat in a steel box, together with a small sample of some radioactive material in which there was a 50% chance that, in any hour, one atom would decay and emit radioactivity. Any release of radioactivity, detected by a Geiger counter, would trigger a device that would cause a hammer to shatter a glass vial containing prussic acid, hence killing the cat. Schrödinger argued that, according to the Copenhagen Interpretation, the cat would be both alive and dead until someone opened the box after an hour to take a look. Schrödinger's popular science book What is Life? influenced Francis Crick and James Watson, winners of the Nobel Prize for discovery of the structure of DNA, both of whom are also linked with Northmoor Road. Watson and his wife Liz owned an apartment at 19 Northmoor Road for some time after he held the Newton-Abraham Visiting Professorship at Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1994. And in the 1990s, Francis Crick and his wife Odile also visited Northmoor Road each summer to stay at the home of their friends, the neuroscientist Colin Blakemore and his