The Strangest Man
Page 57
Notes - Chapter twenty-seven
1 Interview with the Revd. Sir John Polkinghorne, 11 July 2003.
2 Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.
3 Dirac co-signed a letter, dated 27 April 1964, to Professor H. Davenport as part of a campaign to oust Batchelor from the headship of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, UCAM, Hoyle archive.
4 Interview with Yorrick and Helaine Blumenfeld, 10 January 2004.
5 Letter to Dirac from Oppenheimer, 21 April 1963, Dirac Papers, 2/5/10 (FSU).
6 The Diracs were in the USA in 1962 and 1963 (based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton until late April 1962 and from late September 1962 to early April 1963); in 1964 and 1965, based mainly at the Institute for Advanced Study, from September 1964 to spring 1965; in 1966 in March and April, based in Stony Brook, New York; in 1967, based in the spring at Stony Brook and November and December at the University of Texas at Austin; in 1968 and 1969, in December 1968 based in Stony Brook until after Christmas, when they moved on to the University of Miami, where they stayed until spring 1969.
7 Goddard (1998: xiv).
8 Dirac (1966: 8). One of the themes of these lectures is Dirac’s conclusion that the Schrödinger picture of quantum mechanics is untenable when it is applied to field theory and that only the Heisenberg picture is satisfactory.
9 Dirac (1963:53).
10 Several instances of Dirac’s declining to appear on BBC radio and television programmes are documented in Dirac’s archive at Florida State University, notably when he refused to be interviewed in connection with his Scientific American article (letter to Dirac from BBC radio producer David Edge, on 11 June 1963, Dirac Papers, 2/5/10 [FSU]).
11 BBC Horizon programme ‘Lindau’, reference 72/2/5/6025. The recording was made on 28 June 1965 and broadcast on 11 August 1965.
12 Barrow (2002: 105–12). Teller noted, however, that the experimental uncertainties in the calculations were so large that it was not possible definitely to rule out the hypothesis.
13 Barrow (2002: 107).
14 Letter from Dirac to Gamow, 10 January 1961, Gamow archive LC.
15 Quoted in Barrow (2002: 108).
16 Private papers of Mary Dirac. Dirac wrote the notes on 17 January 1933.
17 Letter to Dirac from Gamow, 26 October 1957, Dirac Papers, 2/5/4 (FSU).
18 John Douglas Cockcroft, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society (1968): 139–88; see p. 185.
19 Mitton (2005: 127–9).
20 Overbye (1991: 39).
21 Letter from Gamow to Dirac, June 1965 (undated), Dirac Papers, 2/5/13 (FSU).
22 Letter from Heisenberg to Dirac, 2 March 1967, Dirac Papers, 2/14/1 (FSU). Letter from Dirac to Heisenberg, 6 March 1967, quoted in Brown and Rechenberg (1987: 148).
23 Letter from Geoffrey Harrison, HM Ambassador in Moscow, to Sir John Cockcroft, 19 April 1966, Cockcroft archive, CKFT 20/17 (CHURCHILL).
24 Kapitza gave the lecture at 5 p.m. on Monday, 16 May. Source: Cambridge University Reporter, 27 April 1966, p. 1,649.
25 Letter from Manci to Barbara Gamow, 12 May 1966, LC (Gamow archive). Other information from an interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.
26 Letter from Manci to Rudolf Peierls, 8 July 1986, Peierls archive, additional papers, D23 (BOD).
27 Boag et al. (1990: 43–4).
28 Batelaan, H. (2007) Reviews of Modern Physics, 79, pp. 929–42.
29 Dirac greatly admired Gell-Mann’s skills as a physicist but went out of his way to avoid him on social occasions. Source: interview with Leopold Halpern, 26 February 2006.
30 Gell-Mann (1967: 699). For more examples of Gell-Mann’s initial scepticism about the reality of quarks, see Johnson (2000: Chapter 11).
31 Gell-Mann (1967: 693).
32 ‘Methods in Theoretical Physics’, 12 April 1967, Dirac Papers, 2/28/5 (FSU).
33 Tkachenko was handed back to the Soviet Embassy on 18 September. The British authorities’ story was that Tkachenko had ‘freely expressed’ his wish to return to Russia, but privately they were fearful that he was going to die in their custody. See The Times, 18 June 1967, p. 1; New York Times, 16 September 1967, p. 1. See also the obituary of John Cockcroft by Kenneth McQuillen, former Vice-Master of Churchill College. I thank Mark Goldie, a Fellow of the college, for providing me with this anecdote.
34 E-mail from Chris Cockcroft, 17 May 2007. See also Oakes (2000: 82). The anecdotes were confirmed by Mary and Monica Dirac.
35 Letter from Wigner to Office of International Affairs, 1 September 1965, PRINCETON, Wigner archive.
36 See, for example, letter from Wigner to Manci, 2 September 1965 (FSU, Wigner letters, annex to Dirac Papers).
37 Letters from the Wigners, 6 and 13 May, and 14 September 1968 (FSU, Wigner letters, annex to Dirac Papers).
38 Letter from Manci to Wigner, 10 February 1968, Wigner archive (Margit Dirac file) PRINCETON.
39 Telegram 17 September 1968 (FSU, Wigner letters, annex to Dirac Papers); interview with Mary Dirac, 26 February 2006.
40 Interview with Mary Dirac, 26 February 2006.
41 Letter from Mary Wigner to the Diracs, 7 October 1968, Dirac Papers, 2/6/6 (FSU).
42 Letters from the Wigners to the Diracs, 20 and 25 September and 9 October 1968 (FSU, Wigner letters, annex to Dirac Papers). Interview with Mary Dirac, 26 February 2006 and e-mail 7 June 2006.
43 Interview with Mary Dirac, 26 February 2006 and e-mail 7 June 2006.
44 Interview with Helaine and Yorrick Blumenfeld, 10 January 2004.
45 Interview with Philip Mannheim, 8 June 2006. See also the article on Kursunoglu, ‘The Launching of La Belle Epoque of High Energy Physics and Cosmology’ in Curtright et al. (2004: 427–46).
46 An account of Dirac’s time at the University of Miami is given by Kursunoglu’s wife in Kursunoglu and Wigner (1987: 9–28).
47 Manci wrote to Gamow’s wife on 4 February 1969 to complain that Dirac had not accepted the offer made by the University of Miami: ‘It makes me feel awful’ (LC, Gamow archive, Manci Dirac file).
48 The reaction of Rabbit and Janice Angstrom to 2001 are in Rabbit Redux, 1971, Chapter 1 (in the Fawcett Crest Book paperback edition, pp. 58 and 74).
49 LoBrutto (1997: 277).
50 I am grateful to Tony Colleraine, then Mary’s husband, for his recollections of Dirac’s first visits to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, interview 15 July 2004 and e-mails on 26 September and 22 October 2004.
51 Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003.
52 Letter from Manci to Barbara Gamow, 16 March 1971, Gamow archive LC.
53 Letter from Manci to Wigner, 10 February 1968, PRINCETON, Wigner archive.
54 These FBI documents were declassified in 1986. I thank Bob Ketchum for obtaining a copy of these documents under Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts.
55 Letter from Dirac to Alfred Shild, 29 August 1966 (copy held by Lane Hughston).
56 See, for example, the letter from the Senior Secretary at the University of Texas at Austin to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 8 December 1967, part of the CIA file on Dirac in the 1960s and 1970s. I am grateful to Robert Ketchum for obtaining these documents.
57 Tebeau (1976: 151–71 and 219–35). Stanford (1987: 54–5). Interview with Henry King Stanford, 3 July 2006.
58 Wicker (1990).
59 Letter from Wigner to Manci Dirac, 9 October 1968 (FSU, Wigner letters, annex to Dirac Papers).
60 Miami Herald, 7 May 1970, p. 1.
61 According to Morris (1972), the population of Tallahassee in 1970 was 72,000. The total population of Miami in the same year was 335,000.
62 The Physics Department at Florida State University had recently obtained a Center of Excellence grant from the National Science Foundation to assist in its aspiration to become such a centre.
63 Letter from Colleraine to Dirac, 2 February 1970, Dirac Papers, 2/6/9 (FSU).
64 Tallahassee Democrat, 29
November 1970.
65 Interview with Peter Tilley, 2 August 2005; interview with Leopold Halpern, 26 February 2006.
66 Letter from Norman Heydenburg (Chair of the FSU physics department) to Dirac, 4 January 1971, Dirac Papers, 2/6/11 (FSU).
67 Interview with Helaine and Yorrick Blumenthal, 10 January 2004.
Twenty-eight
Old men have a weakness for generality and a desire to see structures whole. That is why old scientists so often become philosophers […].
EUGENE WIGNER, The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner, 1992
The advice Barbara Walters, doyenne of celebrity interviewers, gave in her 1971 book How to Talk to Practically Anybody about Practically Anything did not quite extend to making conversation with Dirac. Yet the Director of Publicity at the Miami Museum of Science, Dorothy Holcomb, wished she had read the book when she was trying to wrest a few words from him during a buffet reception in his honour on the evening of 8 March 1971.1 After he replied to her ‘Hi!’ with a blank ‘Hello,’ she realised that the only way to get him to speak more than a few words at a time was to ask him to pick the topic of conversation. He chose comic strips. For several minutes, he talked with surprising fluency about the merits of two strips he had been reading since the 1930s: the fifth-century adventurer ‘Prince Valiant’ and ‘Blondie’, a carefree flapper girl who settled down to family life in suburbia. Holcomb was charmed. When Dirac admitted that he could not make head or tail of the quirkier humour of ‘Peanuts’, she suggested he should try a little harder to understand American humour; he agreed. Afterwards, Holcomb made up her mind to buy a copy of The Principles of Quantum Mechanics and also of How to Talk to Practically Anybody about Practically Anything. As Holcomb will have seen, if she got to the end of Walters’ book, it concludes with good advice for everyone who had tried vainly to draw Dirac into conversation: ‘You can’t win ’em all.’2
Before this conversation, Dirac had given a lecture entitled ‘Evolution of Our Understanding of Nature’, which ranged well beyond physics. Still haunted by the early scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, he began by discussing how early humans understood the mechanics of growing grain, graduating from beliefs based on superstition to ideas based on theories grounded in observations. He opposed critics of the Apollo space programme who believed that the money should be spent instead on social programmes: ‘People who equate all the different kinds of human activity to money are taking too primitive a view of things.’ The solution to social problems was not, he argued, to be cheese-paring with the space programme and fundamental research but to avoid ‘the great waste that we see around us’, especially the unemployment of people who want to work. Look at the hippies in California, he said: they welcome the challenge to help fight forest fires rather than just laze around.3
Dirac’s reputation as a speaker enabled him and Manci to sate their appetite for international tourism.4 Florida State gave him the freedom to travel and everything else he needed, in addition to a modest income: an office, companionship, financial support for his research and – most important – respect. The university officials treated him with a reverence that often cloyed into obsequiousness, and they regarded Manci as his queen. She whiled away hours chatting and exchanging risqué jokes with the university’s clubbable President, Bernie Sliger, knowing that he would always take her phone calls and be sympathetic to her every request. In return, the university asked only that Dirac be available when they wanted to display their most illustrious professor to visiting dignitaries; he played along and had some success in disguising his boredom. Only once, when his compliance was taken for granted, did his patience run out: he locked himself in his house and Kurt Hofer had to persuade him to come out, just in time to meet an important visitor.5
Beyond the light supervision of a few graduate students, Dirac had no teaching responsibilities. But in 1973, he agreed to present a series of lectures on the general theory of relativity, aiming to develop the theory from its fundamental principles and to lay bare its logical structure. One of the physics students in the audience, Pam Houmère, recalls:
The first lecture was ‘standing room only’. He began so simply that the office cleaners could have understood it: what is meant by position, what we mean by time, and so on. Later, he built on these foundations brick by brick, making every step of the construction look inevitable. The funny thing was, he never compared the theory with experiment, he just kept stressing how beautiful it was. Only a few students made it to the end of the course, but for those who did, it was an unforgettable experience.6
Dirac presented the lectures most years until 1980 and used them as the basis of his short book General Theory of Relativity, a minor classic of exposition, describing the theory in sixty-nine pages, without a single diagram.
In Tallahassee, the Diracs’ home was about twenty minutes’ leisurely walk from Dirac’s office on the third floor of the university’s Keen Building, in the heart of the campus. Each weekday morning after breakfast, he would link his hands behind his back and walk slowly to his office across a local field, the route that ensured minimum contact with the neighbourhood dogs. In summer, when he wore his baseball cap, he looked like an all-American retiree, but on the coldest days of winter, when he put on the heavy overcoat he had bought almost fifty years before in Lord and Taylor, he looked every inch the venerable English professor. He often carried a forty-year-old umbrella: ‘It was my father’s,’ he told colleagues.7
In his office, he worked at his desk for three hours, pausing occasionally to visit the library. To unexpected visitors who knocked on his office door, he had a simple message: ‘Go away.’8 When the phone rang, he would often lift the receiver off the hook and immediately drop it, without bothering to listen to the caller’s voice.9 At noon, he would join a few colleagues for a brown-bag lunch. Dirac usually said nothing but would occasionally interject with a comment, perhaps on the impenetrability of American football or about the wisdom of trying to educate so many undergraduates in science when so few of them had an aptitude for the subject or even took much pleasure from studying it. He was fond of jokes, especially ones dependent on the interpretation of a single word and ones with a slight sexual edge. This was one of his favourites:
In a small village, a newly appointed priest decided to call on his parishioners. In one modest home, teeming with children, he was greeted by the lady of the house. He asked her how many children she and her husband had. ‘Ten,’ she replied. ‘Five pairs of twins.’ The priest asked, ‘You always had twins?’ to which the woman replied, ‘No, Father, sometimes we had nothing.’10
After lunch, he would return to his office for a nap on his sofa and sometimes attend a seminar, often appearing to sleep through most of it, before returning home for late afternoon tea with Manci. After dinner, he would relax. He and Manci might go to a classical concert, or he might read a novel – Edgar Allen Poe mysteries, Le Carré spy thrillers and Hoyle’s science-fiction stories were among his favourites – or watch television with Manci in the family room, dominated by a painting of Judy when she was a child.11 Dirac watched most of the Nova science documentaries, but the programmes that he and Manci regarded as unmissable were period dramas: The Forsyte Saga – Dirac was spellbound by the leading lady, Nyree Dawn Porter – and Upstairs, Downstairs, dramatising the class divisions between the servants and their masters in an Edwardian household. On the night an episode of the programme was broadcast, the Diracs would accept dinner invitations with friends only if their hosts agreed in advance to watch it with them in silence. One dispute about the evening television schedule threatened to get out of hand, when there was a clash between Cher’s Sunday-night television show – a highlight of Dirac’s week – and the live broadcast of the Oscar ceremony, which Manci was desperate to see. The dispute was resolved several days later, but at a price: they bought a second television.12
The couple did not always resolve their differences so amicably. In August 1972, they had what may have been the wor
st row of their marriage, when they were visiting the recently widowed Betty at her apartment in Alicante, on the south-east coast of Spain. The relationship between the sisters-in-law had long been brittle: part of the problem was that Manci made no secret that she found Betty dull and idle, while Betty was vexed by Manci’s unrelenting bossiness. Tempers flared during a conversation on the apartment balcony when Dirac backed up his sister after she made a sly comment about the behaviour of Hungarians in Budapest at the end of the war. Manci stormed out of town and wrote to Dirac in a rage:
You looked at me, then did all you could to hurt, scare & humiliate me, & embarrass me greatly […] It is a fact that most mental inmates have been driven there by their families. On that 5th floor balcony I felt your presence whenever I was there alone, urging me to jump […] You cruelly, unjustly uncaringly completely identified yourself with my tormentor, and this I did not earn or deserve. I do not feel you are a husband as it is understood by millions. Yes, keep your loyalties to the one so similar to you in lacking human emotions, & I learn not to care or want to die.13
A few days later, she wrote to him again, in a rather different tone:
Thank you for your loving care. For your love, warm & affectionate. For your taking notice when sick or in pain. For heeding for needs I have. For allowing me to read your wishes from unspoken words. For allowing me near you when ill or depressed. For forgiving my ills and extravagances. For never making me anxious and panicky. For treating me as an equal: always justly & fairly. For trying your best to make us around you happy and cheerful. I thank you.14