The Strangest Man

"Have you ever heard of Paul Dirac? Nobody knows his name, yet he’s the only English person who contributed to the quantum revolution in the 1920s. In fact Graham Farmelo did a lot of research in Britain and he said that he’d never met anyone – even in Bristol where Dirac grew up and lived – who’d ever heard of him: the greatest English physicist since Newton! Instead they’d lionised Archie Leach, who was in the same class at school. Archie had gone to America and changed his name to Cary Grant. In Bristol they have statues of him, but not of Paul Dirac. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The Dirac equation. Quantum theory was the theory of the subatomic world and its given us all sorts of things: nuclear reactors, lasers. It tells us why the sun shines and so on. But the big problem in the 1920s was that it was incompatible with Einstein’s relativity. Dirac managed that – a theory that reconciles the physics that deals with large things and physics that deals with incredibly small things – by guessing the equation that nature uses. Read the book! But even now this equation is considered a gem, one of the most beautiful there is. One of the things that it accurately predicted was antimatter."

"It’s certainly striking how little material the author of this book had to work with, regarding Dirac. I mean Farmelo didn’t have a lot of personal information or insight from the man himself – maybe he had some letters but he didn’t have diaries – so it was very difficult for him to know what Dirac was thinking at any moment. It’s not a promising start. When I was sent this book to review I thought, ‘Oh God, this is going to be dreary,’ but I was up all night reading it. Again I think this is interesting because it was a book that touched me personally. You look at the work he did in his 20s and then you look at the decisions he made as a scientist and, as a scientist oneself, you begin to look at what you do and search for parallels in one’s own life. It’s sufficiently close, externally, to let me analyse my life. It’s almost like a self-help book for a scientist. He came up with an equation, the Dirac Equation, which married quantum mechanics – basically the theory of the very microscopic, which is very different from the physics of Newton that we know – and Einstein’s theory of special relativity. And it’s a beautiful equation: simple, beautiful and rich. It predicts the existence of antimatter; it necessitates the existence of antineutrons and antiprotons. Dirac himself thought that was just a mathematical quirk but then other people confirmed it. That alone is enough for Dirac to be considered a spectacular scientist, but he did other stuff too. Out of a fascination with mathematical beauty he discovered the natural world. Antimatter is part and parcel of physics and astrophysics. It happens where you’ve got lots of collisions between massive particles: they always produce a bit of antimatter. You see this when you have high energy collisions between very dense objects: the debris produced is antimatter. Involved in this there’s the big, big unanswered question of where mass comes from. Why do we have weight, why do we have mass, why aren’t we weightless? And the Large Hadron Collider at CERN could explain that. He was an extremely unpleasant character, and that’s how I perceive him, quite simply. People try to translate his unpleasantness into humour but I don’t think the anecdotes are particularly humorous. Farmelo certainly tries to be kind to him, to offer explanations and mitigating motivations. First of all he tries to argue that he was hugely traumatised by his brother’s suicide, and afterwards he tries to argue that maybe he suffered from Aspergers or was autistic. I think it’s fairly difficult to argue these things. I think all we know is that he was a pretty unpleasant character. Well, someone who thought in a similar way to Dirac was Einstein and I think Einstein was very different psychologically: he seemed quite gregarious, had strong relationships with other people – and yet they thought the same way. I would agree though that the way they think about their science is very particular: they drill down and drill down and they don’t mess around, they are really concentrated on one problem and hammer away at it until they get there. And there are very few people who do that. In fact, I think in the current climate it’s very difficult for a scientist to do that. We’re just not giving the opportunity to do so – we have to publish, we have to get grants… Possibly. In terms of funding of science we’re living through a really dire period. There’s not much space for someone to go away and just spend time thinking about a problem and trying to sort it out. I’d love to work in that environment. There’s a lot of that going on and I think it’s essential. I think we have a moral duty to talk about our work in a way that people understand. Artistic media have a role to play too. For five years I’ve been running an artist-in-residency programme at Oxford. I’ve had the composer Jem Finer, who created a work that plays for a thousand years: a segment was performed at the Roundhouse. He also did a piece looking at the universe – an installation relating to science. And there’s a wonderful artist doing a residency at the moment: Keith Tyson. But whilst it’s pretty clear that science can be an inspiration, or a toolbox for artists, offering wonderful ideas and toys, it has its limits as a way of explaining what scientists do. That’s an interesting question. Definitely science will create techniques that will allow people to do things. There’s a beauty in science itself. We were talking about beautiful equations and as we discover the mathematical equations that are the scaffolding of the universe we are very much driven by aesthetics. So it’s possible to deconstruct what we mean by aesthetics in science as opposed to art: it has to do with simplicity, universality, richness. There are all these things you can look at. But any representation is only going to be approximate: to appreciate the true beauty you have to be on the inside, to understand how the equation works."