The Strangest Man - the hidden life of Paul Dirac, mystic of the atom by Graham Farmelo: book review

The Strangest Man (2009) by Graham Farmelo is a detailed account of one of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, and the youngest Nobel Prize winner in 1933 at the age of 30 which he shared with Erwin Shrodinger for theoretical physics and the discovery of new and productive forms of atomic theory.

Born in Switzerland in 1902, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac moved to Bristol, England, with his schoolmaster father, Charles, mother Florence, his brother Felix, and sister Betty, where he became a British citizen in 1919 and studied at Cambridge University. Paul Dirac said he never had a childhood, was not interested in sport, and had little time for literature and theatre. He worked six days a week, only taking Sundays off to go for long walks.

His brother Felix, two years older than Paul, was prevented from studying medicine by their authoritarian father, when he suddenly ‘snapped,’ left the factory where he worked and committed suicide at the age of 25. Paul subsequently paid for his sister Betty to undertake nursing studies when, again, their father did not want Betty to further her education.

Farmelo documents Dirac’s studies in exceptional detail – from his schooling, and his academic lecturers, mentors, and colleagues, including Robert Oppenheimer, Max Born, Walter Elsasser, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Eugene Wigner, Richard Feynman, Paul Ehrenfest, Alan Turing, and Albert Einstein. Dirac was one of Einstein’s most admired colleagues – primarily because they both espoused beauty in science. Dirac was an ambassador of ‘mathematical beauty’ – the fundamental simplicity, inevitability, power and grandeur of mathematics.

His personality was legendary, known as a loner, a man of a few words who spoke only when spoken to, and an ‘emotional cripple.’ It was therefore a surprise to most of his colleagues when he commenced a relationship in 1934 with a colleague’s sister, Margit (Manci) Wigner, a divorcee with two children. Together they had two more children. The last fourteen years of his life were spent in the United States at the Florida State University.

Farmelo leaves no stone unturned as he painstakingly documents an incomplete personality, a full life, and a step-by-step account of the thought processes, successes, and failures that led Paul Dirac to the global acceptance of his atomic theory and his genius, despite him being ‘the strangest man.’