The Strangest Man

Dirac was one of the creators of modern quantum physics. His theoretical contributions are astonishing in their insights and their power. He was, as the title says, a very strange man: painfully shy, laconic in the extreme, and socially awkward. He spoke so rarely that his colleagues at Cambridge used to joke that “a dirac” was a unit of measurement equal to one word an hour. Farmelo is a fine writer and gives a lay reader a deep understanding of why Dirac is considered such a giant in the field.

Paul Dirac was the only Englishman among the founders of “quantum theory”, the revolutionary description of the submicroscopic realm of atoms and their constituents created in the mid-1920s. He concocted an equation to describe an electron traveling close to the speed of light, which predicted an unsuspected world of “antimatter”, and which is inscribed on a flagstone in Westminster Abbey (the only other equation in the Abbey is Stephen Hawking’s expression for the temperature of a black hole). But Dirac was a very strange man. When asked how he found the “Dirac equation”, he replied: “I found it beautiful”. And,… show more.