Skip to main content

The Strangest Man – Graham Farmelo ****

Paul Dirac was arguably the greatest British physicist since Newton. Holder of the same chair as Newton (and Stephen Hawking) at Cambridge, he took an unwaveringly mathematical approach to physics despite his engineering background, always stressing the beauty of the equations as paramount. He tends to be remembered for having predicted anti-matter and specifically the positron, but his role in the development of quantum mechanics was much more significant than this alone.

That Dirac is almost unheard of (and seemingly hardly remembered in his home city of Bristol) is very sad – yet in some ways not surprising, given the unremitting lack of communication that seemed to typify his existence. Graham Farmelo’s book is full of examples of Dirac failing to communicate, whether with the general public or with other scientists – even those as great as Richard Feynman – though he does seem to have delivered some effective public lectures.

This is a big, beefy biography, running to 438 pages before you reach the extensive notes. There is plenty of opportunity to get immersed in the Dirac home life in what seems to have been a highly dysfunctional family. Despite his many years of marriage, Dirac never seems to have come to terms with the realities of family life. But family and friends inevitably come second to the man’s science – and Graham Farmelo manages well the difficult task of leading us through the mental minefields of the development of quantum theory, his excursions into relativity and cosmology, and his unremitting distaste for the the need to dispose of infinities in Quantum Electrodynamics, a field where theory managed irritatingly to predict reality more accurately than any other. If anything real opens a view on Dirac, it was his insistence that this match to reality was less important than the ugliness of the approach.

I do have two minor concerns about this book. One is the sheer length. It is too long. I’ve been taken to task before for complaining about fat books, but popular science should not require such sticking power to get the results. The reason for the length seems to be a case of I’ve-got-access-to-the-archives-itis. I know what this feels like. You get fascinated by all the little details in the primary material – and the result is putting much too much detail into the finished book. At least a third of the content could have been cut out with no loss of understanding.

The other slightly unnerving aspect is the way that Farmelo holds off until chapter 30 of 31 before speculating that Dirac could well have been on the autistic spectrum. This is such an obvious deduction that the reader is from early on wondering why it’s not mentioned. Of course we can never be 100 per cent certain looking back at a historical character, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen better indications, and it’s something that should have been more woven into the main text. These remain small issues, though. This book should be cherished as one of the better scientific biographies -certainly the best of 2009 so far – and gives us an insight into what was the most secretive scientific life of the twentieth century.

Paperback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more