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

I rate this a top shelf biography. As a PhD in theoretical physics the author was appropriately trained to tackle the scientific side of this as well as his long infatuation with the subject (Dirac) which gave him plenty of impetus to get at the human side of the subject. He writes well, the story unfolding easily and warmly, taking us through the usual biographical flow of a life after beginning somewhat abruptly with a valuable late insight into Dirac's own thoughts on his father (in particular) and his life. This insight, gained from a former neighbour and colleague of Dirac's in Florida, shows us both an important human impact made on this man's life, as well as the author's research quality, seeking out and perhaps even going to the USA to interview this person.I knew about Dirac since student days, but since physics wasn't my subject and the quantum stuff way beyond me, I never bothered with finding out about him beyond the basics. But I am truly glad I bought and read this book. The subject emerges as a giant for me now, even though I little understand the intricacies of what he did. It is however, easy to appreciate the magnitude of what he achieved, how he was rated by mentors, colleagues and juniors. When Einstein recommends you as his first choice to appointment at the Institute for Advanced Studies, you know you're of some value as a scientist. When people of the stature of Oppenheimer and Feynman are in awe of you, you know you must be worthy of something. Such was it for Dirac.Unlike at least one of the reviewers here, I am disappointed that we don't get more technical explanations of some of the science. I realise that stuff is over the heads of most bio readers (including me), but I think it might be appropriate for scientific biographers to think about including such material in an appendix (especially when they are trained and capable as Farmelo is). A kind of Technical Details for Dummies appendix, as it were, including the equations, but explained as simply as possible - if that is possible, and I'm sure it is. I give as an example that succeeds admirably Pais' bio of Einstein, where the technical details are provided by the physicist-biographer in a manner that does not intrude for the non-mathematical reader but is highly useful for those who can benefit from it.I see one reviewer found a couple of historical inaccuracies. These are always likely to intrude in a work of this size and breadth. They can be corrected in a second edition and the reviewer thanked for drawing attention to them.In all I am very pleased with this work. I bought it about 8 months ago and have already read it completely twice as well as dipping into various index entries 10 or 15 times.Five stars.

The title of Farmelo’s book comes from Niels Bohr, who told a colleague that Paul Dirac was “the strangest man” to ever visit Bohr’s institute in Cophenhagen. Bohr’s comments related not only to Dirac’s unusually spare social interaction style but also to his iconoclastic style of thinking. In a field that is historically dense with collaborations and exchanges of findings and methods, Dirac was an extreme outlier, as someone who rarely talked at all, infamous for one word responses even in conversations with colleagues about scientific matters.Farmelo blends the story of Dirac’s odd personality and quirky behavior with the story of Dirac the physicist. After all, his “strangeness” is a dominant attribute of both his personal life and his scientific activity.He starts with Dirac’s relationship to his father, Charles Dirac. Charles Dirac was a strict, controlling father. He enforced a hard work ethic, with little social life for Paul, his brother Felix, and his sister, Betty. Felix committed suicide relatively early in his adult life, apparently over frustration with his lack of achievement. Betty clung to the family, looking after her father and mother, Flo, until marrying in her 30s.Paul never lost his resentment over his father’s tight controlling hand. Later in life, he would voice that resentment, sometimes surprising friends and even bare acquaintances, breaking his regular silence with a diatribe against his father’s treatment of him. As he grew older, and especially in his marriage to the Hungarian sister of Eugene Wigner, Manci, he seems to have freed himself to some degree, finding that he could enjoy hobbies like mountain-climbing and swimming. But he maintained an odd, withdrawn character throughout his life, customarily sitting in silence in both scientific discussions and in social situations.Paul’s mother, Flo, was also seemingly hemmed in by Charles’ strong hand. Their marriage deteriorated but ended only with Charles’ death, and long before that she came to look to Paul as her primary emotional support. The combination of a controlling father and a clinging mother put Paul in a kind of vice, no doubt partially responsible for his odd personality.Then there is Dirac the scientist. He was a mathematical physicist, a theorist of a pure kind. And it is that mathematical purity that may be his most profound legacy as a scientist. It is certainly a central theme of Farmelo’s account of his life.Dirac was propelled by mathematics. With a background also in engineering, he certainly was attentive to the need to tie mathematical speculation back to verifiable observations, but it was the math that moved his thoughts.Farmelo quotes Dirac — “The most powerful method of advance that can be suggested at present is to employ all the resources of pure mathematics to attempts to perfect and generalise the mathematical formalism that forms the existing basis of theoretical physics, and after each such success in this direction, to try to interpret the new mathematical features in terms of physical entities . . . “It would be hard to say that Dirac was the first physicist to take his lead from pure, abstract mathematics — after all, the debate over the role of abstract theory vs. experiment and observation goes back to Descartes and Bacon. But it would be just as hard to find a stronger proponent for going wherever the math leads, and then picking up the thread of reality in its wake.In fact, maybe Dirac’s best known original contribution — anti-matter — was a mathematical construction. It took significant time before his speculations could be confirmed in observations of cosmic rays at Caltech and then by his colleagues at the Cavendish Labs at Cambridge.Farmelo stresses Dirac’s insistence that good theory in physics meet a criterion of “mathematical beauty”. “Beauty’ here is somewhat ironically undefined, for someone as meticulous as Dirac in determining the meaning of any theoretical terms. But it relates essentially to simplicity and universality, traceable back to Dirac’s early reading of John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic — something that seemed to have strongly influenced him throughout his career.Another quote serves to state how important the role of beauty in theory was for Dirac — “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.” Despite his atheism, it’s hard not to attribute a kind of faith to Dirac, that the universe itself is “beautiful”, that it be describable in simple, clear terms, because the universe just is a mathematical entity.Despite Dirac’s eccentric social behavior he was at the center of the quantum revolution in physics. I realized I had never appreciate how many theoretical contributions he made, not only in new, original concepts, like antimatter, but also in pushing existing theory to meet his mathematical standards. He worked directly with all of the leading physicists of his time, a regular visitor to the labs of Bohr in Copenhagen and Born and Heisenberg in Gottingen, as well as circulating among the theoretical and experimental physics groups at his own Cambridge. Later in life, he was a frequent visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study, where Einstein and others sought him for a permanent position.Farmelo’s writing is easy, relatively non-technical, even though this is definitely not a “page-turner”. He has the physics credentials to tell us the science side, but it is as much personal biography as intellectual biography. You won’t find a lot of equations, or even complex technical discussion. Yet I think Farmelo did a good job of going to the depth necessary to make it clear that such concepts as anti-matter evolved, in Dirac’s thought, through a compelling mathematical path rather than as blue sky speculations. This might be the greatest strength of his writing.

As a pseudoscientist compared to a theoretical physicist, I enjoy reading a book about a real scientist whose brain works differently from that of most of us. For some reason I love the fact that his personality was different and the associations that went with it such as his father forcing him to speak French at breakfast every morning and if he slipped up the very next time he had a request his father would deny it. Also he spoke very little so the theoreticians who knew him said "one Dirac" is one spoken word per hour. Yet he gave amazingly beautiful and immaculate lectures in physics at Cambridge University. He also had a best friend, a fellow scientist from Russia, with whom he went mountain climbing. He truly was a great theoretical physicist who can be compared to Albert Einstein and who like Einstein derived a beautiful equation in the vein of E = mc(2). He was also the recipient of the Nobel Prize in theoretical physics in 1933. It was interesting to find toward the end of the book that the author compared his personality to that of an autistic person and found an amazing positive correlation. The book was quite long but I could not put it down until it was finished. It also enlightened me as to the period of time in which Paul Dirac worked and to the living conditions of England and Cambridge and of great theoretical physicists of the period. A wonderful read.

This is the best biography I have ever had the privilege to read, I have heard on occasion of Paul Dirac but never imagined how brilliant the man was? Graham Farmilo does an excellent job of giving us a brilliant overview of Dirac's life from his humble beginnings in Bristol to his Cambridge education and subsequent Nobel prize in physics.The brilliant man was way ahead of his time, too clever by far. I was fascinated with his strange behaviour and often had a chuckle at some of his blunt remarks to others.Dirac was one of a number of great physicists who gave us the beginnings of quantum mechanics during the first few decades of the 20th century, his friendships with Kapitza, Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and many others are well documented here.I can not recommend this book enough, Dirac was the strangest man yes but more importantly he was a quantum genius and one of Britain's greatest ever scientist without a doubt.

An engrossing read. Farmelo certainly picked a hard nut to crack in writing about Dirac for a lay audience, in terms both of Dirac personally and of the complexity of his work. Unusually for a scientific book, I couldn't put it down! It covers the purely biographical aspects without skipping the harder conceptual material of the physics. For the most part the author does a good job of tracing the development of quantum physics, the math and Dirac's place within it, without giving the impression of talking down to the layman. I am always interested in the early biography of creative people, showing how they developed and kindled their creative interests. There is the additional element in science of discovering how the individual fitted in to what has become very much a collective enterprise. Farmelo's treatment of this succeeded brilliantly. It's interesting to note how even extreme individualists like Dirac could only develop their ideas through interaction (either personal or through published material) with their peers. Later in his career, when the creative fires were dissipating, Dirac (and the same goes for Einstein and others) usually found themselves at variance with the cutting edge scientists of the new generation. Indeed, the later biography tends to run into a series of academic meetings or family history which is only of interest to the curious. The baubles and honours tend to arrive just when the creative fires are damping down! The speculation about Dirac's psychology and possible autism at the end of the book rounded off a fascinating portrait - it is good that Farmelo did not duck the issue. The fact that Dirac was an unusually high functioning individual even with these characteristics does not diminish their relevance. Indeed, quite possibly the intenser focus and logic associated with them was integral to the evolution of his talent. We could do with more scientific biographies like this. Great achievement.

Biographies vary greatly, from the unimaginative hagiography via simple chronologies through to intellectually penetrating studies which bring their chosen subject alive, whatever previous knowledge the reader might have of the subject. Graham Farmelo's book about Paul Dirac - the undeservedly little-known Bristol-born theoretical physicist is a prime exemplar of the last of these. Farmelo expounds joyfully and perceptively on the life of this man, who surely ranks with the all-time greats in the understanding of the physical universe, names such as Einstein and Newton being almost household names in today's woefully science-ignorant society. The life of a ground-breaking scientist such as Dirac must necessarily be expressed using some understanding of his subject, but Farmelo positively delights in providing his readers with what is needed in this, enlightening the intelligent non-scientist without talking down to the expert. Dirac was, in his most productive years, an archetypal non-communicator - taken indeed to an extreme. Farmelo's researches are particularly meticulous, and he brings the various strands of testimony together in a considered way. Having been a research physicist, albeit an experimentalist with a pathetic grasp of mathematics, I found his exposition illuminating, and even an aid to exploring the inter-relationships between the scientists with whom I'd interacted. This is a superb book, even to its title, which derives from a (probably offhand) comment by Niels Bohr.

Paul Dirac is probably the most important theoretical physicist that Britain has ever produced. It's a pity that so few people in Britain, or indeed in Bristol where he grew up, have ever heard of him.Yet, along with Einstein, Eisenberg, Pauli and Schrodinger, he was a central, pioneering figure in quantum physics. Graham Farmelo is an excellent writer and he has done a brilliant job describing the life of this mercurial genius.

I'd heard Dirac's name mentioned in science programmes, but never really heard much else about him. Clearly he is a crucial character to mathematicians and scientists, neither of which applies to me, but he would also have been a fascinating study for psychiatrists. I found much of Farmelo's description of Dirac's work totally beyond my understanding, but I realised that without him modern science would not have moved into sub-atomic realms. What I found more interesting was the family background, the effect of his parents' incompatibility, the distinctions made between the siblings and Dirac's reluctance to engage in social occasions which required "small talk". This is a man who rarely started a conversation with anyone, and couldn't maintain a conversation unless it was about his work, but despite this he formed very strong friendships which later led to his involvement with campaigning for the release of colleagues who had been "retained" by the Soviet Union. Dirac knew everyone during what seems to have been a Golden Age of Science from the '30s onwards, Einstein, Oppenheimer and those who went on to develop the Atom Bomb. This is not the easiest book to read, and needs some concentration, but it is well worth the effort to learn about a man who was a colossus in his field, but who was in many ways a very isolated rather sad character.