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: #4080 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.

The Author's Explanation of the Science Just Doesn't Work
I was an undergraduate at St John's, Cambridge in Dirac's time. I wanted to relish this book. But I can't. It has been greatly overrated.

The biographer of a great scientist has a massive problem: the science. Say nothing about the science and you omit the very thing that made the scientist notable; get deep into the science, and you greatly reduce the potential readership of the book; summarise the science for the general reader - ah, that's not at all easy.

Farmelo does attempt to explain Dirac's science in a way that won't put anybody off. There is rarely more than one page of science before attention shifts back to something easier, such as the rise of Hitler or Dirac's relations with his mother. There are no equations and no long chains of reasoning; most of the technical terms seem vaguely familiar: electron, proton etc. All these are sensible precautions, but does the author actually succeed in explaining the science in a way that the general reader can understand? I don't think he does, but to help you judge for yourselves I've picked a representative extract.

On page 336 Farmelo introduces the technique of `renormalisation':

`According to (Dyson's) theory, the observed energy of an electron is the sum of its self-energy - resulting from the interaction between the electron and its field - and the bare energy, defined to be the energy the electron is supposed to have when completely separate from its electromagnetic field. But the bare energy is a meaningless concept because it is actually impossible to switch off the interaction between the electron and its field; only the observed energy can be measured.'

`The virtue of renormalisation is that it enables every mention of bare energies in the theory to be removed and replaced with quantities that depend only on observed energies. Using this technique, theorists could use quantum electrodynamics to calculate - to any degree of accuracy - the value of any quantity the experimenters cared to measure. Despite the success of the technique, Dirac abominated it, partly because . . . `

Farmelo goes on to say what it was that Dirac didn't like about `renormalisation', but that explanation won't mean anything to you unless you have already understood from the words just quoted what `renormalisation' actually is. Well, have you understood that? I haven't, but then I only read Modern Languages.

This `renormalisation' thing seems to have been pretty important in Dirac's life. On page 356 Dirac comes up with `a new approach .. that dispensed with one of the foundations of renormalisation theory that Dirac most disliked .. ` On page 398 `Renormalisation was now widely accepted as a rigorous branch of mathematical physics, with no sleights of hand; Dirac vehemently disagreed.' On page 405 `Dirac mounted one of his last attacks on renormalisation in front of an audience of some two hundred students and Nobel laureates.' On page 412 Dirac `wanted his final published words to execrate renormalisation.. ..' On page 425 Farmelo, assessing Dirac in retrospect, opines that `He was always uneasy with algebraic approaches to physics and with any mathematical process he could not picture - one of the reasons why he was so uncomfortable with renormalisation.' We readers who don't come close to grasping even what kind of a concept `renormalisation' might be tend to feel a bit left out of things.

The extract I've given is a pretty fair sample, so you can make up your own mind. I think that many other readers will, like me, find most of Farmelo's explanation of Dirac's science quite useless. It might as well not be there. Of course, you can easily skip over the science stuff - but that is the very part of the book which ought to show you what Dirac actually did which made him more eminent than a thousand other eccentric professors. No, this does not come close to being a five-star book!