Graham Farmelo (2009) The Strangest Man. The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius.

Graham Farmelo’s biography of Paul Dirac won the Costa Book Award the year it was published. That was a while ago. I need to do the maths (or arithmetic). Sixteen years ago. You’d need to go back 100 years to inhabit the world of Paul Dirac. Einstein’s special theory of relativity had not yet changed the world.  But had changed the way the world was viewed. A Kuhnian revolution in scientific thought. Paul Dirac was a genius whose work Einstein admired.

Here’s the rub. When I asked a guy that gives me books he’s read if he’d heard of Dirac, he said, ‘No.’

He did know who Stephen Hawkins was. Most readers do. Hawkins had appeared in The Simpsons. A national figure. With his robotic voice, a national treasure. Like Dirac, Lucasian Professor of Physics at Cambridge.

Nobel Prize winner. Richard Feynman, one of the young upstarts who came after that group of Nobel Prize winners that had set forward the principles of quantum physics, admitted, he was ‘No Dirac’. He wasn’t being overly modest. Feynman also won the Nobel Prize.

I’d heard of Feynman. Mostly though his witty quotes and popular book.

Like my bookish friend, I  didn’t know who Dirac was either. I’d heard of Schrodinger, mostly though the thought experiment with a cat in a box(both dead and/or alive depending on who does the viewing). Not that I understand it.  Rutherford and his atoms.  I couldn’t do a contemporary degree because I couldn’t pass the equivalent of O’grade maths.

Klein wrote the Dirac equation predicted (the unpredictable). If an electron beam was fired at a barrier, more electrons will be reflected back than were present in the original number. He compared it to a tennis player striking a ball, but several balls flew off his racket.

Dirac was fluent in German and French and learned some Russian. The latter because of the influence of Kapitza (Kaptiza-Dirac effect 1933 used in modern-day lasers) who had converted him to the belief in the Soviet system of Communism.  Dirac’s silences were legendary, even with the closed community of the geniuses that shaped our modern world.

In Copenhagen when all the pre-war greats gathered Bohr complained to Rutherford, ‘This Dirac, he seems to know a lot of physics. But he never says anything.’

‘A theorist’s theorist.’

Maths was the native language of Dirac. Geometry its expression. His early training in engineering allowed him to visualise equations. Create spin, anti-matter from matter. Positrons from electrons. String theory.  Beauty was his goal. Ugly theories that worked in experimental science did not satisfy Dirac. Like Einstein he was looking for better. A unifying principle that could be expressed simply in beautiful mathematics. God might not roll dice. But God was a mathematician. Dirac, the atheist, believed in maths and its purity of purpose. Truth was beauty. But great though was, Dirac believed, a young man’s game.    

An anonymous ode to the electron pinned to the Cavendish Laboratory circa 1930. Dirac had its number.

‘Once in a smooth order our time was spent

As the classical equations told us were to go, we went.

We vibrated in the atom, and a beam of light was freed;

And we haven’t any structure—only mass and charge and speed.

We know not if we’re particles, or a jelly sort of phi,

Or waves, or if we’re real at all, or where are we or why,

To protons—holes in ether—according to Dirac.

 

The old familiar faces die out, but the light goes out first. Bristol born and raised. A pioneer in quantum mechanics. Cosmology and general relativity. Centrifugal forces to separate. Laser technology and computers. Dirac was a big fan of Cher and HAL 9000 computer in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). He admired Stanley Kubrick’s use of the visual rather than the vocal.

That’s the way he thought would be clichéd. Because how can a non-genius understand genius?  

Pattern recognition.

Baron Cohen in Trinity College point to two factors that need to be considered.

i) Autistic men who marry a foreign wife—Dirac was married almost fifty years to the aristocratic Hungarian, Manci.

ii) Environment of 1920s Cambridge.

‘Cambridge was a niche where his eccentricities would have been tolerated and his skills valued. College life provided him with a regular daily routine and everything he needed. His bed was made for him, food was provided for him. High Table in college would have provided social contact if he wanted it, with its own rules and routines to render it highly predictable. In the mathematics department he was free to do what he wished.’

What Dirac wished for was time to think. How many of us do that? Read on.

Notes.

Paul Dirac the youngest theorist to have won the Nobel Prize in 1933. He shared the prize with Erwin Schrödinger.

 

Paul Dirac’s Major Achievements (Ranked by Importance)

Rank	Achievement	Description
1	Dirac Equation (1928)	Unified quantum mechanics with special relativity; predicted antimatter.
2	Foundations of Quantum Electrodynamics (QED)	Pioneered the quantum theory of electromagnetic interactions.
3	Fermi–Dirac Statistics (1926)	Explained behavior of fermions, essential for quantum theory and solid-state physics.
4️⃣	Prediction of Magnetic Monopoles (1931)	Theoretical particles that could explain charge quantization.
5️⃣	Dirac Large Numbers Hypothesis (1937)	Suggested deep connections between cosmological constants.
6️⃣	Dirac–Born–Infeld Action (1962)	Influential in string theory and modern field theory.
7️⃣	Vacuum Polarization	Revealed that “empty” space is filled with fleeting particle pairs.

Blog Post: “Paul Dirac—The Silent Architect of Modern Physics”

Born in Bristol in 1902, Dirac’s early life was marked by emotional negative spin and linguistic torture. Charles, a father, who acted as god at home. Purdah of English at the dinner table, demanding only French be spoken (his father taught French and German) and all food be eaten. He bullied and belittled his sons, daughter and wife.

 The Dirac Equation: Where Relativity Meets Quantum

In 1928, Dirac unveiled an equation that described the electron—it also foretold the existence of antimatter. A revelation and revolution. The Dirac Equation is often hailed as one of the most beautiful equations in physics. It bridged Einstein’s relativity with Schrödinger’s quantum mechanics, and in doing so, changed the course of science forever.

 Quantum Electrodynamics: The Blueprint of Light

He laid the groundwork for quantum electrodynamics (QED), the theory that explains how light and matter interact. Without QED, we wouldn’t have lasers, semiconductors, or even a coherent understanding of atomic structure.

 Fermi–Dirac Statistics: The Rules of the Quantum Game

Before Dirac, quantum particles were a chaotic mess. With Fermi–Dirac statistics, he gave order to the quantum realm, explaining how particles like electrons behave in systems. This was foundational for everything from quantum computing to the physics of stars.

 Magnetic Monopoles and Cosmic Consideratons?

Dirac’s prediction of magnetic monopoles—hypothetical particles with a single magnetic pole—a quantum leap. Though never observed, their existence would elegantly explain why electric charge is quantized.

His large numbers hypotheses also hinted at deep, mysterious links between micro and macro scales of the expanding universe.

 A Legacy Woven into the Fabric of Reality

Dirac’s early-to-late equations include contributions to string theory and vacuum polarization. They continue to be applied in working hypotheses and the testing of the laws of physics.