The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom | Graham Farmelo

The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom | Graham Farmelo | A Beautifully Written Biography of an Extraordinary Physicist

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	The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom Graham Farmelo Basic Books, 2009 - 560 pages average customer review:based on 27 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Paul Dirac was among the great scientific geniuses of the modern age. One of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, the most revolutionary theory of the past century, his contributions had a unique insight, eloquence, clarity, and mathematical power. His prediction of antimatter was one of the greatest triumphs in the history of physics. One of Einstein?s most admired colleagues, Dirac was in 1933 the youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize in physics.

Dirac?s personality is legendary. He was an extraordinarily reserved loner, relentlessly literal-minded and appeared to have no empathy with most people. Yet he was a family man and was intensely loyal to his friends. His tastes in the arts ranged from Beethoven to Cher, from Rembrandt to Mickey Mouse.

Based on previously undiscovered archives, The Strangest Man reveals the many facets of Dirac?s brilliantly original mind. A compelling human story, The Strangest Man also depicts a spectacularly exciting era in scientific history.

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A life.

The biography of P. A. M. Dirac is compelling; beautifully written!
Dirac was as contemporary of Albert Einstein, and his science and his life story share elements in common with that of Einstein.
Yet there are hundreds of Einstein biographies, to my knowledge, this is a first for Dirac. While Einstein reveled in the glare of the press, Dirac shunned it.
Both won the Nobel Prize in physics, Dirac for his pioneering role in quantum mechanics, his equation for the electron, his discovery of the positron, and his mathematics. His book Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930) is still the bible in the subject.
On top of this he pioneered quantum electrodynamics.
While both protected their privacy, Dirac avoided statements to the press, and avoided the limelight going along with fame.
His story is compelling: an abusive father, his reaction to a horrible childhood, a hate-filled home, the suicide of his brother. If anyone outside science knows anything about the private Paul Dirac, they are likely to know that he was a man of few words, answering questions with yes, no; or more likely "I don't know!"
Perhaps Dirac felt that nature and science is expressed in the language of mathematics, and that words by comparison tend to be empty.
And Dirac often argued that the more profound insight is more likely to be uncovered in a beautiful mathematical equation; as opposed to hard experiments!
The author Farmelo (his earlier book It Must Be Beautiful) seems to be born to tell the story of Dirac. It is compelling, and the characters are brought to light, each in a portrait that makes them real: other scientists, Heisenberg, Bohr, and especially his lifelong friend and experimental physicist Peter Kapitza from the Soviet Union; later Nobel for his discovery of superfluidity of liquid helium.
And his wife, the sister of the Princeton physicist Eugene Wigner; an extrovert, and in personality the opposite of Paul Dirac.
At conferences Eugene Wigner, famous for his modesty, referred to his "famous brother-in law!"
The periods of Dirac's life span his childhood in England, his career in Cambridge, his travels to the Soviet union before and during the Cold War, and his retirement in Florida, USA.
I met him once at lunch when he was visiting his son in Aarhus where I was teaching at the time!
There is some science in the book, but mostly it is about Dirac's life.
It has become popular to speculate that geniuses might have suffered from some form of undiagnosed autism, to account for their character quirks. Personally I believe this is unlikely.
Reviewed by Palle Jorgensen, February 2010.

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A Beautifully Written Biography of an Extraordinary Physicist

This is a beautifully written biography of Paul Dirac, one of the founding fathers of quantum theory, a towering taciturn genius marked by legendary reticence and an almost otherworldly literal-mindedness.

Quantum theory basically describes matter and energy at atomic scales. Don't know anything about quantum theory? It doesn't matter: you will still find this delightful book gripping from start to finish because (a) Farmelo is a gifted writer, (b) the book is accessible to anyone with the slightest interest in physics or in the history of science, and (c) the development of the ideas underlying quantum theory will take the reader on a magical mystery tour that is at once exhilarating and stunning. The quantum world brazenly defies our naïve logical expectations of what is possible or even conceivable in the atomic realm; it is fantastical, beyond imagination, and yet virtually every technological advance in the past 50 years depends entirely on this proven bedrock of fog and mere probability.

Dirac, the physicist, was an utterly brilliant and original theorist known for the elegance, beauty, and concision of his papers. Farmelo discusses his many accomplishments and critical contributions to quantum theory with admirable simplicity and clarity. This not a book on quantum theory, however, so you don't have to worry about understanding any mathematical formulas to follow the thrust of Dirac's ideas.

Dirac, the man, was a fascinating enigma. Niels Bohr called him "the strangest man." As Farmelo notes, "even by the standards of theoretical physicists [Dirac] was profoundly eccentric." A man so solitary and reserved, and so unresponsive to and so unwilling to engage in even polite social banter, that "...his colleagues invented a new unit for the smallest imaginable number of words that someone with the power of speech could utter in company - an average of one word an hour, `a Dirac'."

Farmelo catalogues many stories and anecdotes about this "strangest man." My favorite, because it so clearly demonstrates his inert literal-mindedness, is that, "According to one story, [his wife] once snapped at him while he was eating his dinner, `What would you do if I left you?' only for him to reply -- after a half-minute pause-- `I'd say "Goodbye dear'."

This is a wonderful, entertaining book and a biography worthy of Dirac. You should read it. I think you will enjoy it immensely.

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A successful science book and biography

Although I'm neither a physicist nor a cognitive
scientist, I've long been interested both in Physics
and in Cognitive Development (especially concerning
autism and Asperger Syndrome). So, Farmelo's book
on Dirac was doubly interesting to me, and it provided
an excellent and quite readable narrative on
the fascinating history and development of quantum
mechanics as well as an illuminating biography of
the "strange man" whose clearly autistic characteristics
both enabled and hindered his Nobel-winning insights
and discoveries about sub-atomic particles.

The book requires more than a passing familiarity
with atomic physics and vocabulary, but the author
explains Dirac's work quite clearly, along with
that of Einstein, Pauli, Bohr, and Schrödinger, all
of whom struggled not only to understand Dirac's
theories but also to understand his remarkably odd
personality and behaviour.

While there are indeed a few relatively minor
editing flaws in this book, they did not
detract at all from its two-fold goal of presenting
an accessible description of a difficult topic
of science along with an insightful biography of
a "strange" genius. My only disappointment about
the book was its lack of a section that at least
attempted to explain the "beautiful mathematics"
of Dirac's work. But I suppose that would have
frightened off even more science-averse readers.

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An ecellent book on a great man: the life of Paul Dirac

This book comes highly rated and reviewed by leading newspapers and science magazines. I agree. It tells the life of one of the super great minds of all time not just of physics.

He made many discoveries in the advancement of physics and quantum theorh. He postulated the existence of antimatter long before any pysical evidence. He won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1933.

Paul Dirac spent his life in the company of other greats such as Einstein, Schrodingerer, etc. He was a teacher as well-spending the last years of his life at Florida State.

I think if by reading a good biography you gain insight into another's life, you also gain insight into your own life.

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The story of the father of quantum mechanics

I went to Cambridge in 1967 to 1970 and received my degree in Natural Sciences, particularly Physics. Prof. Dirac gave his retirement lecture while I was there and I arrived 3 hours early in order to get a seat, to discover that the hall was completely filled (including people hanging on for dear life at the back walls) and the overflow crowd already in the courtyard. I gave up and went home. I wish I had shown up a lot earlier, but I was young and foolish. This book does an excellent job of depicting the professional and personal life of one of the two great minds of the 20th century, the other being Einstein. As a physicist, later to go on to do research in theoretical physics and publish some puny papers (as most academic physicists do) I regarded Dirac as high-school basketball players regard Michael Jordan.

Whether you are a scientist or not, this book will prove interesting, not least because of the notion, introduced to me for the first time, that Dirac may have had a high-functioning form of autism. Impossible to know, of course, as one cannot diagnose at a distance, but very consistent. A fascinating man who lived in the most interesting time for Physics since Newton, and whose contemporaries established our modern thinking of the laws of nature and looked up to Dirac as their thought leader for so long.

Excellent book, highly recommended.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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