The Strangest Man; the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo

For those of us interested in how quantum mechanics came into being and flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, Farmelo's biography of Paul Dirac is a wonderful review of the period. Dirac was among the giants of the field along with Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Peter Kapitza, Wolfgang Pauli, and Robert Oppenheimer. But he was also very human with a complex and painful family situation.

When he came to eminence in his 20s, Dirac was extremely reticent and seemed almost devoid of normal human emotions. Lots of Dirac stories developed among his colleagues based on the fact that it was difficult to get him to say anything at all. Here is an example of his conversational style. This is late in his life when he was a little more open and was talking to the artist who was painting his portrait:

Artist: Can you put into layman's terms what you're working on, Professor?
Dirac: Yes. Creation.
Artist: Wow! Tell me more.
Dirac: Creation was one vast bang. Talk of a steady state is nonsense.
Artist: But if nothing existed beforehand, what was there to bang?
Dirac: That is not a meaningful question.

Gradually, fellow physicists lured the young Dirac into more connection with the outside world with hiking and mountain climbing and family visits. His social life became full and warm, a minor miracle given his early reclusiveness.

The portrayal of Dirac's social and emotional characteristics is deeply thoughtful and deftly placed in the scene of changing political realities during the years before and after WWII. Many people at Cambridge University were hopeful that Russia's experiment with communism would lead to greater prosperity and a more civilized society. The Stalin era dampened that hope, but Dirac remained friends with his Russian colleagues through it all, and he often visited the USSR. He traveled alot, doing sabbatical years at Princeton and being dragged around the world when his wife wanted him out of Cambridge because a lady friend seemed to have her eye on him.

Farmelo has given us a warm and enriching life story in a very readable way in spite of the need to include explanations of very complex intellectual abstractions.