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The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius, by Graham Farmelo
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"A monumental achievement - one of the great scientific biographies." (Michael Frayn). The Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather. Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship. The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history. "A wonderful book...Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science." (Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph).
- Sales Rank: #5136704 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Faber and Faber
- Published on: 2009-12-24
- Format: International Edition
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.87" h x 1.57" w x 4.92" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 576 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Paul Dirac (1902–1984) shared the Nobel Prize for physics with Erwin Schrödinger in 1933, but whereas physicists regard Dirac as one of the giants of the 20th century, he isn't as well known outside the profession. This may be due to the lack of humorous quips attributed to Dirac, as compared with an Einstein or a Feynman. If he spoke at all, it was with one-word answers that made Calvin Coolidge look loquacious . Dirac adhered to Keats's admonition that Beauty is truth, truth beauty: if an equation was beautiful, it was probably correct, and vice versa. His most famous equation predicted the positron (now used in PET scans), which is the antiparticle of the electron, and antimatter in general. In 1955, Dirac came up with a primitive version of string theory, which today is the rock star branch of physics. Physicist Farmelo (It Must Be Beautiful) speculates that Dirac suffered from undiagnosed autism because his character quirks resembled autism's symptoms. Farmelo proves himself a wizard at explaining the arcane aspects of particle physics. His great affection for his odd but brilliant subject shows on every page, giving Dirac the biography any great scientist deserves. (Sept.)
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Review
Kirkus *Starred Review*
“Paul Dirac was a giant of 20th-century physics, and this rich, satisfying biography does him justice…. [A] nuanced portrayal of an introverted eccentric who held his own in a small clique of revolutionary scientific geniuses.”
Peter Higgs, Times (UK)
“Fascinating reading… Graham Farmelo has done a splendid job of portraying Dirac and his world. The biography is a major achievement.”
Telegraph
“If Newton was the Shakespeare of British physics, Dirac was its Milton, the most fascinating and enigmatic of all our great scientists. And he now has a biography to match his talents: a wonderful book by Graham Farmelo. The story it tells is moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.”
New Statesman
“A marvelously rich and intimate study.”
Sunday Herald
“Farmelo’s splendid biography has enough scientific exposition for the biggest science fan and enough human interest for the rest of us. It creates a picture of a man who was a great theoretical scientist but also an awkward but oddly endearing human being…. This is a fine book: a fitting tribute to a significant and intriguing scientific figure.”
The Economist
“[A] sympathetic portrait….Of the small group of young men who developed quantum mechanics and revolutionized physics almost a century ago, he truly stands out. Paul Dirac was a strange man in a strange world. This biography, long overdue, is most welcome.”
Times Higher Education Supplement (UK)
“A page-turner about Dirac and quantum physics seems a contradiction in terms, but Graham Farmelo's new book, The Strangest Man, is an eminently readable account of the developments in physics throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s and the life of one of the discipline's key scientists.”
New Scientist
“Enthralling… 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.”
John Gribbin, Literary Review
“Fascinating …[A] suberb book.”
Tom Stoppard
“In the group portrait of genius in 20th century physics, Paul Dirac is the stick figure. Who was he, and what did he do? For all non-physicists who have followed the greatest intellectual adventure of modern times, this is the missing book.”
Michael Frayn
“Graham Farmelo has found the subject he was born to write about, and brought it off triumphantly. Dirac was one of the great founding fathers of modern physics, a theoretician who explored the sub-atomic world through the power of pure mathematics. He was also a most extraordinary man - an extreme introvert, and perhaps autistic. Farmelo traces the outward events as authoritatively as the inward. His book is a monumental achievement – one of the great scientific biographies.”
Roger Highfield, Editor,New Scientist
“A must-read for anyone interested in the extraordinary power of pure thought. With this revelatory, moving and definitive biography, Graham Farmelo provides the first real glimpse inside the bizarre mind of Paul Dirac.”
Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, Master of Trinity College, Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge and Astronomer Royal
“Paul Dirac, though a quiet and withdrawn character, made towering contributions to the greatest scientific revolution of the 20th century. In this sensitive and meticulously researched biography, Graham Farmelo does Dirac proud, and offers a wonderful insight into the European academic environment in which his creativity flourished."
Barnes & Noble Review
“Farmelo explains all the science relevant to understanding Dirac, and does it well; equally good is his careful and copious account of a personal life that was dogged by a sense of tragedy…. [I]f [Dirac] could read Farmelo’s absorbing and accessible account of his life he would see that it had magic in it, and triumph: the magic of revelations about the deep nature of reality, and the triumph of having moved human understanding several steps further towards the light.”
Newark Star-Ledger
“[An] excellently researched biography…. [T]his book is a major step toward making a staggeringly brilliant, remote man seem likeable.”
Los Angeles Times
“Graham Farmelo has managed to haul Dirac onstage in an affectionate and meticulously researched book that illuminates both his era and his science…. Farmelo is very good at portraying this locked-in, asocial creature, often with an eerie use of the future-perfect tense…, which has the virtue of putting the reader in the same room with people who are long gone.”
SeedMagazine.com
“[A] tour de force filled with insight and revelation. The Strangest Man offers an unprecedented and gripping view of Dirac not only as a scientist, but also as a human being.”
New York Times Book Review
“This biography is a gift. It is both wonderfully written (certainly not a given in the category Accessible Biographies of Mathematical Physicists) and a thought-provoking meditation on human achievement, limitations and the relations between the two…. [T]he most satisfying and memorable biography I have read in years.”
Time Magazine
“Paul Dirac won a Nobel Prize for Physics at 31. He was one of quantum mechanics’ founding fathers, an Einstein-level genius. He was also virtually incapable of having normal social interactions. Graham Farmelo’s biography explains Dirac’s mysterious life and work.”
Library Journal
“Farmelo did not pick the easiest biography to write – its subject lived a largely solitary life in deep thought. But Dirac was also beset with tragedy… and in that respect, the author proposes some novel insights into what shaped the man. This would be a strong addition to a bibliography of magnificent 20th-century physicist biographies, including Walter Issacson’s Einstein, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and James Gleick’s Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.”
American Journal of Physics
“[A] very moving biography…. It would have been easy to simply fill the biography with Dirac stories of which there is a cornucopia, many of which are actually true. But Farmelo does much more than that. He has met and spoken with people who knew Dirac including the surviving members of his family. He has been to where Dirac lived and worked and he understands the physics. What has emerged is a 558 page biography, which is a model of the genre. Dirac was so private and emotionally self-contained that one wonders if anyone really knew him. Farmelo’s book is as close as we are likely to come."
American Scientist
“[A] highly readable and sympathetic biography of the taciturn British physicist who can be said, with little exaggeration, to have invented modern theoretical physics. The book is a real achievement, alternately gripping and illuminating.”
Natural History
“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.”
Science
“[A] consummate and seamless biography…. Farmelo has succeeded masterfully in the difficult genre of writing a great scientist’s life for a general audience.”
Physics Today
“[An] excellent biography of a hero of physics…. [I]n The Strangest Man, we are treated to a fascinating, thoroughly researched, and well-written account of one of the most important figures of modern physics.”
Nature
“As this excellent biography by Graham Farmelo shows, Dirac’s contributions to science were profound and far-ranging; modern ideas that have their origins in quantum electrodynamics are inspired by his insight…. The effortless writing style shows that it is possible to describe profound ideas without compromising scientific integrity or readability."
Freeman Dyson, New York Review of Books
“In Farmelo’s book we see Dirac as a character in a human drama, carrying his full share of tragedy as well as triumph.”
American Journal of Physics
“Farmelo’s exhaustively researched biography…not only traces the life of its title figure but portrays the unfolding of quantum mechanics with cinematic scope…. He repeatedly zooms his storyteller’s lens in and out between intimate close-ups and grand scenes, all the while attempting to make the physics comprehensible to the general readership without trivializing it. In his telling, the front-line scientists are a competitive troupe of explorers, jockeying for renown – only the uncharted territory is in the mind and the map is mathematical…. We read works like Farmelo’s for enlightenment, for inspiration, and for the reminder that science is a quintessentially human endeavor, with all...
About the Author
Graham Farmelo is a By-Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and an Adjunct Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. He edited the bestselling It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science in 2002. His biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, won the 2009 Costa Biography Award and the 2010 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize. To find out more go to www.grahamfarmelo.com
Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating
By Illuminatus
Paul Dirac possessed one of the most profound intellects in history, virtually single handedly creating the fields of relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. But his extraordinarily introverted personality and complete lack of interest in anything outside theoretical physics have left him essentially invisible to the public eye. Even physicists familiar with his stunning achievements know almost nothing about his private life. Hence, Graham Farmelo's wonderful new biography is most welcome indeed.
Carefully researched and very well written with an engaging style, the text flows like a well crafted novel. Not only does this work provide valuable insights into the nature and, often tragic, life of "the strangest man" (as Bohr was said to have called him) but conveys something of the atmosphere in the academic centres (Cambridge, Göttingen, Copenhagen) where the dramatic events in the early history of quantum mechanics took place.
Perhaps inevitably in a work of this length, Mr. Farmelo occasionally stumbles. He asserts that the great Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam was a student of Dirac when, in fact, Salam did his Ph.D. under Paul Matthews and Nicolas Kemmer. And he incorrectly attributes the first explanation of the Lamb shift to Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger when the honour belongs to Hans Bethe. Such errors, however, do not adversely impact the significance and enjoyment of the book. Indeed, if a genuine criticism can be applied, it is in the uselessness of attempting to explain Dirac's scientific contributions to laymen. This is hardly the fault of Mr. Farmelo. It is simply that quantum field theory cannot be understood without the requisite higher mathematics. Fortunately, such diversions are mercifully few and do not affect the flow.
This book is heartily recommended to anyone interested in the history of science and the development of a great mind.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
A Humane Biography
By Jebediah Springfield
This is a biography of Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, whose contributions to fundamental physics in the first half of the twentieth century are among the finest gems of human thought. It is important to emphasize from the very start that this is not really a scientific biography of Dirac. Instead, it is a wonderfully humane and personal biography of the man. Dirac's science is certainly mentioned, but the author is careful to remain brief and unassuming in his descriptions of the science which are smoothly incorporated into the main story line. This is one of the many merits of this beautiful narrative as it allows even those among us with no scientific background to enjoy the work without any sense of loss.
The biography follows Dirac throughout his life from his early childhood in Bristol to his final years in Florida. The most striking thing one notes early on are the extremely detailed descriptions, evidence to the tremendous amount of work Farmelo must have devoted to researching his subject. But, the details are never allowed to coagulate into an unswallowable mix. Instead, they are masterfully laid out and serve to create a vivid picture of the era and environment. Whether it is the family dinners in Dirac's childhood or his years in Cambridge as a college Don, the narrative is lively and animated to the point that we almost feel as if we are present there with Dirac through his pains, efforts, and triumphs. In this regard, the biography is an absolute success.
While I believe many would enjoy this book, this is especially true for anyone who dabbled in physics, even if only through popular books. Dirac is a household name for physicists, but so far no authoritative biography was available. "Dirac" stories and anecdotes surface in conversations here and there and form a "physics" folklore of sorts. This book is certain to be to "Dirac" folklore what the Grimm brothers have become to german folk tales. It contains a myriad of new "Dirac" stories to relish and memorize and be told over (otherwise boring) dinners with colleagues.
I strongly recommend this book to physicists, who might care for the subject more than others, but also to anyone else who is interested to peer into the life and works of a great mind.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
A life.
By Palle E T Jorgensen
The biography of P. A. M. Dirac is compelling; beautifully written!
Dirac was as contemporary of Albert Einstein, and his science and his life story share elements in common with that of Einstein.
Yet there are hundreds of Einstein biographies, to my knowledge, this is a first for Dirac. While Einstein reveled in the glare of the press, Dirac shunned it.
Both won the Nobel Prize in physics, Dirac for his pioneering role in quantum mechanics, his equation for the electron, his discovery of the positron, and his mathematics. His book Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930) is still the bible in the subject.
On top of this he pioneered quantum electrodynamics.
While both protected their privacy, Dirac avoided statements to the press, and avoided the limelight going along with fame.
His story is compelling: an abusive father, his reaction to a horrible childhood, a hate-filled home, the suicide of his brother. If anyone outside science knows anything about the private Paul Dirac, they are likely to know that he was a man of few words, answering questions with yes, no; or more likely "I don't know!"
Perhaps Dirac felt that nature and science is expressed in the language of mathematics, and that words by comparison tend to be empty.
And Dirac often argued that the more profound insight is more likely to be uncovered in a beautiful mathematical equation; as opposed to hard experiments!
The author Farmelo (his earlier book It Must Be Beautiful) seems to be born to tell the story of Dirac. It is compelling, and the characters are brought to light, each in a portrait that makes them real: other scientists, Heisenberg, Bohr, and especially his lifelong friend and experimental physicist Peter Kapitza from the Soviet Union; later Nobel for his discovery of superfluidity of liquid helium.
And his wife, the sister of the Princeton physicist Eugene Wigner; an extrovert, and in personality the opposite of Paul Dirac.
At conferences Eugene Wigner, famous for his modesty, referred to his "famous brother-in law!"
The periods of Dirac's life span his childhood in England, his career in Cambridge, his travels to the Soviet union before and during the Cold War, and his retirement in Florida, USA.
I met him once at lunch when he was visiting his son in Aarhus where I was teaching at the time!
There is some science in the book, but mostly it is about Dirac's life.
It has become popular to speculate that geniuses might have suffered from some form of undiagnosed autism, to account for their character quirks. Personally I believe this is unlikely.
Reviewed by Palle Jorgensen, February 2010.
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