The Strangest Man

By Graham Farmelo,

Book cover of The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom

Book description

Paul Dirac was among the greatest scientific geniuses of the modern age. One of Einstein's most admired colleagues, he helped discover quantum mechanics, and his prediction of antimatter was one of the greatest triumphs in the history of physics. In 1933 he became the youngest theoretician ever to win the…

Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Why read it?

2 authors picked The Strangest Man as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

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.

From David's list on the lives of 20th century physicists.

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,…

From Marcus' list on physics and physicists.

Want books like The Strangest Man?

Our community of 11,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like The Strangest Man.

Browse books like The Strangest Man

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in physicists, quantum physics, and London?

Physicists 45 books
Quantum Physics 104 books
London 856 books