Product Description

Paul Dirac was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in 20th-century science: quantum mechanics. One of the youngest theoreticians 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10261 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-22
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 539 pages

Review
'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. This is a monumental achievement - one of the great scientific biographies.' --Michael Frayn

'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, Britain's Einstein, to explain how this great unsung national hero harnessed beauty to reveal the existence of anti-matter and even to glimpse the beginnings of string theory.' --Roger Highfield, New Scientist

'This is a beautifully written, remarkable biography of a remarkable man. It paints a sensitive portrait of his character, puts into words his science in a way that will capture every reader's attention and memorably conveys Dirac's achievement.' --Silvan Schweber

Review
'This is a beautifully written, remarkable biography of a remarkable man. It paints a sensitive portrait of his character, puts into words his science in a way that will capture every reader's attention and memorably conveys Dirac's achievement.'

About the Author
Graham Farmelo is Senior Research Fellow at the Science Museum, London, and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. Formerly a theoretical physicist, he is now an international consultant in science communication. He edited the best-selling It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science in 2002. He lives in London.

Customer Reviews

A Gem Of A Book...
I'm a Physics student, and love to read things not directly related to my course; this book fits the bill perfectly, and, although not a big fan of biographies, this book unfolds like a well written story, where all the characters that come and go just happen to be Nobel Prize winners, or, more likely, have things that we use every day named after them.

I could not reccomend this book more for people with even a passing interest in Physics, there's not too much hardcore maths here at all, but the story and the way he is portrayed is magical.
Farmelo, I salute you.
And everyone, but this!

Jess

Best British Physicist After Newton
The Gold Standard for scientific biographies has been set by Abraham Pais and when I first opened this book I was slightly disappointed by the comparison: no scholarly bibliographies, no mathematical formulae to discuss the ideas. When I went on reading I became quite impressed. The author has done a great deal of research on archival material, much of it new. Also, in a very clever way he has explained Dirac's ideas with no mathematics at all (there is only one formula in the book, written in English rather than maths notation). And the personality of the man is exceedingly well presented. Besides Dirac, there are very good insights about Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and many others.

Dirac, the definitive biography
Dirac was one of the founders of quantum theory and one of the most profound and original minds of the twentieth century. But, as the title of this book says, he was also a very strange man, austere in his personal relations, sometimes to the point of perversity, and unable to communicate, either emotionally or verbally, except with only a few very close friends. The origin of his behaviour may have been a form of autism, but was undoubtedly also influenced by his early family life and the relationship with his parents, particularly his father. The book thoroughly and sensitively weaves the story of the development of Dirac the theoretical physicist and his discoveries with the psychology of his personal life, and explores how the influence of his family was important in shaping his interaction with the world.

Dirac's achievements, grounded as they are in advanced mathematics, are difficult to explain to non-scientists, but the author succeeds admirably and his clear explanations enable the general reader to appreciate even the most abstract concepts. Anecdotes about Dirac are part of the folklore of physics, but this book contains a wealth of documented facts and information that I for one was unaware of. The most surprising (for me) was Dirac's experimental work on isotope separation. Above all there emerges from the book a strong impression of what drove Dirac in his endless search for perfection as he saw it. Needless to say, he was not satisfied that he had achieved this (even towards the end of his life saying to one person that his life had been a failure!), but his ideas remain as important as ever. Suggestions he made, long overlooked, are still proving to be fruitful today.

The author obviously has great admiration for his subject, but this does not prevent him honestly evaluating Dirac, both his towering scientific achievements and where he had lack of vision; as well as his deficiencies as a human being. Farmelo has produced a superb book, beautifully written and meticulously researched. It is writing of a very high order, which is surely destined to be the definitive biography of Dirac for the foreseeable future.