Review: November 2009

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 It was as if Paul Dirac were made of antimatter. Other physicists of the generation that created quantum mechanics appeared normal by comparison: they were sociable creatures whose quirks (and there were many) only made them seem more human. Niels Bohr liked to entertain his associates in his lavish mansion on the grounds of a Carlsberg brewery. Erwin Schrödinger really liked women (he lived openly with both his wife and his mistress). Albert Einstein played his violin in chamber ensembles.

But Dirac did none of those things. He was legendary for his inability to appreciate the give-and-take of normal conversation. In a typical Dirac story, recounted in this book, which I also heard as a graduate student in the 1960s, Dirac stands at the blackboard after giving a lecture. Someone in the audience raises his hand and says, “I don’t understand the equation on the top right-hand corner of the blackboard.” The room is silent, the seconds ticking by uncomfortably, until at last the uneasy moderator asks for a reply to the question. “That was not a question,” says Dirac without emotion, “it was a comment.”

Graham Farmelo, a senior research fellow at the Science Museum, London, has taken on the challenge of examining the significance of Dirac’s life and work with thoroughness and obvious sympathy. Dirac’s greatest accomplishment was an equation that predicted the existence of antimatter even before there was experimental proof that the weird stuff existed. He also wrote an influential textbook on quantum mechanics, so lucid in its insights that it has never gone out of print.

Farmelo’s eloquent and empathetic examination of Dirac’s life raises this book above the level of workmanlike popularization. Using personal interviews, scientific archives, and newly released documents and letters, he’s managed—as much as anyone could—to dispel the impression of the physicist as a real-life Mr. Spock, the half Vulcan of Star Trek. Dirac was certainly oddly self-absorbed, “childlike but never childish,” as a colleague once described him, but as Farmelo’s narrative unfolds, you see that it was just because Dirac’s humanity was hidden by a profound reserve.

Perhaps that wasn’t so much an abnormality (though Farmelo ventures a diagnosis of autism) as a consuming passion for science that satisfied the young Dirac far more than the messiness of interpersonal relations. The older Dirac, married and with family responsibilities, took canoe trips with a friend and found amusement in the Sunday comics (he especially liked Prince Valiant and Blondie). Reading Farmelo’s biography, the enigma grows less strange. Or perhaps, as with the quantum mechanics Dirac helped develop, we just grow more accepting of the strangeness as it becomes more familiar to us.