PAUL DIRAC’S terseness is legendary. The master of monosyllabic answers, he went through life refusing to engage with colleagues, students and even his own family. Having read many examples of Dirac’s repartee in ‘s new biography The Strangest Man, I have to confess that he comes across as a truly unpleasant man. I am surprised that people put up with him.
Dirac was the theoretician’s theoretician, responsible for a crucial piece of the explanation of fundamental particles and forces. His equation, which he proposed in 1928, married the quantum physics of Schrödinger and Heisenberg with Einstein’s special relativity. With it, he predicted the existence of antiparticles, subsequently discovered in detailed studies of cosmic rays, and shared the Nobel prize for physics with Schrödinger in 1933.
Surprisingly, the experimental verification of his prediction seemed of no great import to the Englishman. To him, the truth of a physical theory lay in its mathematical beauty, not in its experimental verifiability. Throughout his life, he applied this filter to almost everything he worked on. As a result, and after an incredibly productive period in his twenties and thirties, he became detached and reluctant to accept the stunning developments of the generation of physicists that followed him.
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Farmelo has used a stash of Dirac’s letters and notes to build an enthralling yet deeply depressing narrative. Dirac came from a dysfunctional family: a mediocre, authoritarian father and a cloying, resentful mother who batted their successful son back and forth between them throughout their long marriage. Dirac took his mother’s side but resented the sporadic trips that he had to take to their small family home in Bristol.
His older brother committed suicide in his early twenties and although Dirac, true to himself, refrained from any public show of grief, Farmelo reveals that he was profoundly scarred by this event throughout his life. All this is used to justify Dirac’s demeanour.
The Strangest Man is a long, laboured, but engaging book. Farmelo cuts back and forth between Dirac’s ideas, his interactions with his colleagues and his painful relationship with his family. The ideas are not explained in great detail but the fraught and thrilling exchanges between the founders of quantum physics – as well as between the giants of the University of Cambridge in the 1920s and 30s – make for a gripping read. His involvement with his family shifts gears when he marries Manci Wigner, the outspoken, volatile sister of physicist . Their fractious but long marriage is dissected in detail and is the main thread of his story in the last 30 years of Dirac’s life.
Towards the end of the book Farmelo hazards an alternative explanation for Dirac as a person and thinker: he may have been autistic. Farmelo’s suggestion is plausible and he makes a strong case, but it is also part of a modern trend of excusing antisocial geniuses for their odd behaviour. Regardless of whether Dirac was autistic or simply unpleasant, he is an icon of modern thought and Farmelo’s book gives us a genuine insight into his life and times.
Faber