And Farmelo shows that Dirac's eccentricities may well have stemmed from undiagnosed autism.The Strangest Man is a moving human story, and a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history.įrom the Publisher: Paul Dirac was among the great scientific geniuses of the modern age. He catches Dirac's absolute belief in the beauty of mathematics with warmth and sympathy. Yet Farmelo also reveals a man who, while seemingly lacking in emotion, could manage to love and father a family. His best friend was the Russian physicist Peter Kapitza, and even at the height of the purges Dirac holidayed in the Soviet Union. Dirac had a traumatic relationship with his family: his brother committed suicide, and he hated his father to the end of his life. He is said to have cried only once, when his friend Einstein died.Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers in Florida, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and the people around him.

Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather. His silences were legendary and when he spoke, he betrayed no emotion. The youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and almost completely unable to communicate or empathise. He predicted, purely from what he saw in his equations, the existence of antimatter. Paul Dirac was a pioneer of quantum mechanics and was regarded as an equal by Albert Einstein.

The strangest man book