Graham farmelo biography of paul dirac
The strangest man. The hidden life of Paul Dirac
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The Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather. Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship. The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history.
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- Der seltsamste Mensch. Das verborgene Leben des Quantengenies Paul Dirac
- Springer
- Berlin (Germany)
- ; (electronic)
- p.
The Strangest Man
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The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius
Paul Dirac () was the first truly modern theoretical physicist. After a desperately unhappy childhood in Bristol, UK, his training in engineering and mathematics prepared him to co-discover quantum theory, the most revolutionary scientific theory of the twentieth century. A legendary introvert, his golden streak in research from included his successful prediction of anti-matter which won him a Nobel Prize and brilliant speculations on the existence of magnetic monopoles. In , he married Manci Balazs, in many ways his polar opposite &#; warm, friendly and unscientific. He later became an apostle of mathematical beauty and its importance to fundamental physics &#; the words on his gravestone are ‘Because God made it that way&#;’.
1.‘I never had a childhood’
Dirac’s family rarely had visitors. His father to spoke to him only in French, his mother only in English.
2. Quantum pioneer
Dirac co-invented quantum mechanics and was the first to marry it to the special theory of relativity in this theory of the electron.
3. Antimatter‘s Conceiver
Dirac conceived half the early universe in his head: he predicted the existence of the anti-electron in , a year before it was first detected, and foresaw the new world of anti-matter. The physicist Werner Heisenberg regarded this as ‘perhaps the biggest of all the big jumps in modern physics.’
Dirac, lecture at Princeton University, autumn
4. Opposites
In , Dirac married the Hungarian divorcée Manci Balazs. The unlikely couple had two daughters.
5. Religion of mathematical beauty
For Dirac, mathematical beauty was ‘almost a religion’ – he believed that successive fundamental theories were increasingly beautiful. From the late s, this
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius - Hardcover
Review
Kirkus *Starred Review*
Paul Dirac was a giant of 20th-century physics, and this rich, satisfying biography does him justice [A] nuanced portrayal of an introverted eccentric who held his own in a small clique of revolutionary scientific geniuses.
Peter Higgs, Times (UK)
Fascinating reading Graham Farmelo has done a splendid job of portraying Dirac and his world. The biography is a major achievement.
Telegraph
If Newton was the Shakespeare of British physics, Dirac was its Milton, the most fascinating and enigmatic of all our great scientists. And he now has a biography to match his talents: a wonderful book by Graham Farmelo. The story it tells is moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.
New Statesman
A marvelously rich and intimate study.
Sunday Herald
Farmelo&#x;s splendid biography has enough scientific exposition for the biggest science fan and enough human interest for the rest of us. It creates a picture of a man who was a great theoretical scientist but also an awkward but oddly endearing human being This is a fine book: a fitting tribute to a significant and intriguing scientific figure.
The Economist
[A] sympathetic portraitOf the small group of young men who developed quantum mechanics and revolutionized physics almost a century ago, he truly stands out. Paul Dirac was a strange man in a strange world. This biography, long overdue, is most welcome.
Times Higher Education Supplement (UK)
A page-turner about Dirac and quantum physics seems a contradiction in terms, but Graham Farmelo's new book, The Strangest Man, is an eminently readable account of the developments in physics throughout the s, s and s and the life of one of the discipline's key scientists.
New Scientist
Enthrall
The Strangest Man
Book by Graham Farmelo
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius is a biography of quantum physicist Paul Dirac written by British physicist and author, Graham Farmelo, and published by Faber and Faber. The book won the Biography Award at the Costa Book Awards, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.
The title is based on a comment by physicist Niels Bohr four years before his death that of all the scientists who had visited his institute, Dirac was "the strangest man".
Overview
Farmelo charts Dirac's life from his upbringing in early 20th-century Bristol, through his years in Cambridge, Göttingen and Princeton up until his death in , and that of his wife 18 years later.
Throughout the book, Dirac's work and his unusual personality is explored, with his reservedness, apparent lack of empathy, and relentless literal-mindedness leading way to several humorous anecdotes. For example, when approached by two graduate students, while on a brief visit to Berkeley, Dirac sat through a brief presentation about their work on quantum field theory, bracing themselves for his perceptive comments, there was a long silence, after which Dirac asked them "Where is the post office?" Offering to take him there, the students suggested that he could give them his thoughts on their presentation, to which Dirac replied, "I can't do two things at once."
The book is divided into thirty-one chapters, each beginning with a short epigraph and covering a set time period, for example, chapter Twenty-one is entitled "January Summer ", and begins with a short quote by Paul Carus. The final two chapters break from the dating style, in order to discuss "Dirac's Brain and Persona" and his "Legacy". The book has a comprehensive set of notes, index, and six pages of black and white photographs. In the final chapter, Farmelo presents arguments that Dirac m