The strangest man - G. Farmelo

While I appreciated that somebody took the time to collect facts and happenings in Dirac’s life and list them in a biography, I really wish that somebody else had done it. The book is interesting if you are interested to learn about Dirac’s life, going through the prose is like chewing gravel.

I guess that the author wanted to try and make the life of a theorist sound “interesting”, except that it obviously cannot be “interesting” in the same sense that the life of Indiana Jones is. It is very hard to build cliffhangers if the whole life is spent behind a desk doing math - which is what happened here -, and math papers are not written, though of or received like the Watergate investigation articles, math discoveries are not like the discovery of Tutankhamon’s tomb. The point is that this is completely ok - it is interesting the way it is, it is interesting in a different way from Indiana Jones’ life and discoveries, and if you try to depict in another way either 1. you did not find it interesting and felt the need to adapt it, 2. you think people are too dumb to understand it, 3. you are not up to task and resort to a cheap trick. It is just insulting, I feel, to both Dirac’s legacy and the readers.

The result of this approach is that one has to eat ice cream with ketchup because apparently all food has to somehow be similar to fries, and the reader has to digest math papers described as “sumptuous pieces of mathematics” - who in the world reads a math paper and then says: Oh, ain’t this a SUMPTUOUS PIECE OF MATHEMATICS? Was it really necessary to conclude a chapter with “While the world was heading into the gutter of war, Dirac was looking up at the stars.” just because there’s an article about cosmology being published in the late thirties?

One reason why I wanted to learn about Dirac’s life is that somebody in my Bachelor’s claimed that Dirac had said that a beautiful equation is better than a correct one, which is a statement I agree with but could not easily find attributed to Dirac on the web. Dirac did say something like this, we have for example:

It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations then to have them fit experiment

So I am happy this point is clarified. We also have him writing on a blackboard:

PHYSICAL LAWS SHOULD HAVE MATHEMATICAL BEAUTY

I write it down here so I don’t have to open the book again to read it (the chapter ends shortly afterwards with the sentence “Yet, as events were about to prove, Dirac’s detractors had been too hasty in writing him off.” In the following chapter the author talk about another paper Dirac published.)

There is a lecture called “The Egineer and a Physicist” whose transcription would probably be interesting to read. The book mentions Dirac liking T.E. Lawrence’s Seven pillars of wisdom, I want to look up what that is. I think it would be interesting to look at his Principles of quantum mechanics just to see what it’s like and how things are presented.