QFT: Dirac

I have trouble with Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful.................Albert Einstein, as quoted in The Strangest Man - the title itself due to Neils Bohr.

Graham Farmelo's biography of Dirac mentions that Dirac's undergraduate education was in electrical engineering, but even so he wasn't introduced to Maxwell's equations until well into his graduate education at Cambridge - a reminder of how different the world of physics was in the 1920s. Three years later, in Copenhagen, Dirac invented creation and annihilation operators for the description of the quantum electromagnetic field.

One needs to be rather strange indeed to be the strangest man in an institute of theoretical physics, but Dirac filled the bill. Very likely, he fitted somewhere in the autistic spectrum. Fans of The Big Bang Theory might imagine an utterly taciturn version of Sheldon, except with much narrower interests.

There were many tragic aspects of his life, notably his bitter relationship with his father, a domineering man whom Dirac blamed for blighting his childhood. An outsider could guess that Dirac must have been an impossible child - silent, strange, and without empathy or elementary grasp of social skills.

One of the tasks assigned to the young visitors at Bohr's institute in Copenhagen was writing down Bohr's papers as he dictated them - a task made difficult by Bohr's tendency to mumble incomprehensibly in a mixture of English, German, and Danish, and by his endless revisions and qualifications. Dirac was soon fired from that job after telling Bohr: "In school I was taught not to start a sentence until I knew how I was going to finish it."

Farmelo notes one incident that provides some insight into Dirac's character. Dirac was miserably seasick during the entire 16 hour voyage to Copenhagen from England. His reaction was to sail in rough weather every chance he got until he cured himself of this "weakness".