‘Dirac was a militant atheist,’ objected the Dean of Westminster, Edward Carpenter, when he was asked if Dirac might be commemorated in the Abbey’s science corner.23 The Oxford physicist Dick Dalitz led a group of scientists that began to press for Dirac to be remembered alongside Newton and Rutherford. For someone to be worthy of a place in such company, the Abbey authorities had to be sure that he or she was a Christian – or at least not inimical to religion – and was judged, after a decade’s reflection, to be of ‘millennial significance’.24 Carpenter was easily persuaded of Dirac’s status, but Dalitz found it hard to demonstrate that Dirac passed the religious test, especially after the Dean found out about Pauli’s comment ‘There is no God and Dirac is his prophet.’ Pauli could make things difficult for Dirac even when they were both dead.
During the stalemate, Dalitz found an unanswerable way to counter the objection: if Dirac’s parents had christened him, then – regardless of any derisive comments he had made about religion – he was officially a Christian.25 Dirac would have been amused by the absurdity. In the late 1980s, Dalitz spent weeks trawling through parish records in Bristol but could find no evidence that Charles and Flo Dirac had christened their children, and this line of investigation drew a blank. However, the church authorities were impressed to hear that Dirac was a member of the Papal Academy and that he had made no antireligious comments during its meetings. Dalitz and his colleagues kept up their pressure on the authorities, and, in early 1990, after six years of lobbying, the new Dean of Westminster declared himself ‘very sympathetic’ to their cause. It was finally won in early 1995.26
The commemoration took place in Westminster Abbey on Monday, 13 November 1995, beginning with Evensong at 5 p.m. Though much less well publicised, the ceremony was on a scale as grand as Rutherford’s fifty-eight years before: the Abbey looked gorgeous, the choir sounded magnificent, and the congregation was in good voice. After tributes to Dirac’s scientific work had been read, the mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah, President of the Royal Society, unveiled the commemorative stone in the nave of the Abbey, next to Newton’s gravestone and just a few paces from Darwin’s. Stonemasons in Cambridge had used a piece of Burlington Green slate quarried from the Lake District to produce a two-foot square slab of stone and etch into it the inscription ‘P. A. M. Dirac OM physicist 1902–84’, with a statement of his equation.27
Stephen Hawking gave the final address, using his voice synthesiser to speak through the Abbey’s antiquated public-address system.28 He began with his usual arresting clarity and humour:
It has taken eleven years for the nation to recognise that he was probably the greatest British theoretical physicist since Newton, and belatedly to erect a plaque to him in Westminster Abbey. It is my task to explain why. That is, why he was so great, not why it took so long.29
His final words consisted of another barb: ‘It is just a scandal that it has taken so long.’ Dalitz threw anxious glances at his fellow organisers; evidently, Hawking did not know that at least a decade had to elapse after a subject’s death before he or she could be commemorated – Dirac’s ceremony was at most only a year late.30 Afterwards, Dalitz sought out the Abbey authorities and apologised.31
After the organist had played Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in A Major, Dirac’s daughter Monica and her two children laid flowers on the memorial plaque, before the congregation sang the hymn ‘Lord of Beauty, Thine the Splendour’. The music had been well chosen.
Angry that Westminster Abbey had questioned Dirac’s suitability for commemoration, Manci did not attend the ceremony: ‘The English are hypocrites,’ she fumed. ‘Lord Byron is buried in the Abbey, [and] he was the greatest rogue of the century.’32 After Dirac’s death, Manci become the keeper of his flame, firing off affronted notes to obituarists and chroniclers of her husband’s life who cast any doubt on her view that he was a scientific saint.33 Abraham Pais was startled when he received a letter from her, insisting that Dirac was not an atheist. ‘Many times did we kneel side by side in Chapel, praying. We all know, he was no hypocrite.’34 Friends of Dirac, certain that he was agnostic, were puzzled: did he join her at prayer out of politeness? Or had Dirac privately practised a religion he had mocked among friends? Or was Manci fantasising?
After she had come to terms with Dirac’s death, Manci remained lively and active for ten years, travelling in Europe and the USA, and entertaining an almost unbroken stream of guests, including Lily Harish-Chandra, Leon Lederman and his wife Ellen, and Wigner’s daughter Erika Zimmermann.35 When she was alone, Manci’s idea of a perfect day was to spend it shopping, playing with her dog, hobnobbing with Florida State officials, adjusting her investments and driving out with her pals for lunch at a local Marriott hotel, where she traded gossip while munching on cheese blintzes.36 She was in close touch with her daughters, constantly worrying about Mary, who lived nearby and was often in poor mental health. In the evening, Manci would settle down in front of the television with a glass of sherry to watch public-service documentaries and her favourite game shows, Jeopardy! and The Price Is Right. Through letters and endless phone calls, she kept in touch with friends and family all over America and Europe, though not with her sister-in-law Betty, who died in 1991.
Still angry with Churchill College for what she regarded as their terrible treatment of Elizabeth Cockcroft, Manci took her revenge when she withdrew Dirac’s archive from the college. She arranged for it to be transferred to Florida State University, where the archive is now stored in the Dirac Science Library, which Manci formally opened in December 1989.37 Outside the library, she unveiled a statue of Dirac by the Hungarian sculptor Gabriella Bollobas, showing him in old age, reading The Principles of Quantum Mechanics. The statue is peculiarly lifeless, with no sign of the energy and imagination that propelled him to greatness.
Manci never mellowed: she would still switch in an instant between mean-spiritedness and generosity. After railing at Halpern for an entire morning, she would spend the afternoon trying to sweet-talk Florida State officials into giving him a permanent position in the physics department.38 She behaved no more consistently towards her brother Eugene, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease: in public, she adored him but in private she described him witheringly as ‘a third-rate physicist’.39 On the telephone, she argued with him for hours about family matters, haranguing him for his politics and for associating with ‘the Moonies’. On New Year’s Day 1995, she called Leon and Ellen Lederman hours after Wigner’s death, and said to each of them in turn: ‘Thank God the monster is dead.’40
Even in her ninth and tenth decades, Manci kept abreast of the news. In late 1989, she was jubilant when, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet-backed Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party abdicated its monopoly power and agreed to free elections. Soon afterwards, during the presidency of George Bush Senior, she considered applying for American citizenship so that she could vote against him if he stood for re-election. Delighted when Bill Clinton first won the presidency, in late 1995 she wrote supportively to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who sent a courteous reply on White House notepaper (‘Dear Ms Dirac […]’).41 No letter ever gave Manci more pleasure.
She spent her last few years in pain with arthritis and suffering grievously from asthma. Friends and family urged her to move into a care home, but she would hear nothing of it: she was going to live out her days at home, no matter what the cost of round-the-clock home assistance. Early in 2002, after she tripped over her dog and broke her hip, she had no choice but to be admitted to hospital, where she died a few days later. Mary and Monica arranged for her to be buried with Dirac under a joint gravestone; his epitaph was unchanged, hers was ‘Let her generous soul rest in peace.’
Notes - Chapter twenty-nine
1 The account of Ramond’s encounter with Dirac is taken from an interview with Ramond on 18 February 2006 and from subsequent e-mails. Note that the date of the encounter given here is later than the one given in an earlier version of the story (Pais 1998:
36–7); Ramond confirmed the date quoted here, after checking his departmental records. It is not possible to give the precise date of the meeting.
2 E-mail from Pierre Ramond, 22 December 2003.
3 Tallahasse Democrat, 15 May 1983, page G1.
4 Letter to Dirac and Manci from Dirac’s mother, 8 April 1940, Dirac Papers, 1/4/10 (FSU).
5 Interview with Dr Watt on the telephone, 19 July 2004.
6 Dirac’s last talk, ‘The Future of Atomic Physics’, was in New Orleans on 26 May 1983: Dirac Papers, 2/29/52 (FSU).
7 Dirac’s surgeon was Dr David Miles. I thank Dr Hank Watt for providing me with a copy of the post-operation report.
8 Solnit (2001: 104).
9 Halpern (1985). Interview with Halpern, 24 February 2006.
10 The essences Halpern used were echinacea, milk thistle and ginseng: interview with Halpern, 24 February 2006.
11 Dirac (1987: 194–8).
12 Letter from Manci Dirac to Lily Harish-Chandra, 30 September 1984 (property of Mrs Harish-Chandra).
13 Letter from Manci Dirac to Lily Harish-Chandra, 16 March 1984 (property of Mrs Harish-Chandra).
14 Interview with Barbara Dirac-Svejstrup, 5 May 2003.
15 Interview with Barbara Dirac-Svejstrup, 5 May 2003.
16 Interview with Peter Tilley, 2 August 2005.
17 Dirac’s death certificate says that he died of respiratory arrest. The coroner found that the final cause of his death was not kidney failure but clogged arteries. See Dirac Papers, 1/9/17 (FSU).
18 Telephone call with Hansell Watt, 19 July 2004.
19 Manci chose an Episcopalian service because the American Episcopal Church is the Anglican Church in America and is a province of the Anglican Communion under the Archbishop of Canterbury. Information from Steve Edwards, interview, 16 February 2006.
20 E-mail from Pierre Ramond, 23 February 2006.
21 I am grateful to Mary Dirac, Steve Edwards, Ridi Hofer and Pierre Ramond for their recollections of the funeral.
22 The details of Judy’s case are from Mercer County Surrogate’s Office. The papers that closed the case of Judith Thompson are dated 29 October 1984.
23 Letter from Dick Dalitz to Peter Goddard, 3 November 1986 (STJOHN; permission to quote this letter from Dalitz during interview with him 9 April 2003).
24 Letter from Peter Goddard to the Master of St John’s College, 26 May 1990, STJOHN.
25 Interview with Richard Dalitz, 9 April 2003.
26 Letter from Michael Mayne to Richard Dalitz, 20 May 1990, STJOHN.
27 The memorial stone was designed and cut by the Cardozo Kindersley workshop in Cambridge, see Goddard (1998: xii).
28 Letter from Dalitz to Gisela Dirac, 30 November 1995, property of Gisela Dirac.
29 Goddard (1998: xiii).
30 Interview with Richard Dalitz, 9 April 2003.
31 Letter from Dalitz to Gisela Dirac, 30 November 1995, property of Gisela Dirac.
32 Letter from Manci to Gisela Dirac, 4 July 1992, property of Gisela Dirac. Manci was wrong about Byron’s burial. When his remains were brought back to England, burial in the Abbey was refused, and he was interred at Hucknall. Three subsequent unsuccessful attempts were made to insert a memorial to him in the Abbey, the last being in 1924, when the supporting letter was signed by Hardy, Kipling and three former prime ministers (Balfour, Asquith and Lloyd George). Permission for a plaque in Poets’ Corner was finally given only in 1969.
33 See, for example, the letter from Manci to the editor of Scientific American, August 1993, p. 6.
34 Letter from Manci to Abraham Pais, 25 November 1995, in Goddard (1998: 29).
35 The Ledermans had become friendly with the Diracs since May 1980, when Dirac attended the conference on the history of particle physics. Lily Harish-Chandra was married to the mathematician Harish-Chandra, Dirac’s colleague; Erika Zimmerman was the daughter of Wigner from a relationship he had in Göttingen in the late 1920s.
36 Interview with Peggy Lannuti, 25 February 2004.
37 Manci did arrange for his Nobel Medal and certificate to be returned to St John’s College (letter from Manci to ‘Anna’, 15 October 1986, Wigner archive PRINCETON). Manci’s version of the story of Elizabeth Cockcroft’s alleged ejection from Churchill College is told in Oakes (2000: 82).
38 Letter from Manci to ‘Anna’, 15 October 1986, Wigner archive PRINCETON.
39 Interview with Kurt Hofer, 21 February 2004; interview with Leopold Halpern, 26 February 2006.
40 Interview with the Ledermans, 30 October 2003.
41 Letter to Manci from Hillary Rodham Clinton, 12 February 1996 (DDOCS). Ms Rodham Clinton wrote: ‘It is a pleasure to hear from individuals who share a vision of a better life for all Americans. It is particularly rewarding to hear from people who realize that achieving that vision will not always be easy.’ Interview with Monica Dirac, 1 May 2006.
Thirty
Then she showed me this picture and I knew that it meant ‘happy’, like when I’m reading about Apollo space missions, or when I am still awake at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. in the morning and I can walk up and down the street and pretend that I am the only person in the whole world.
CHRISTOPHER BOONE, narrator in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night Time, 2003
Bristol has never taken Dirac to its heart. Today, the few reminders in the city of its association with Dirac include a little-noticed abstract sculpture, the name on a grimly functional building and a few plaques. During my many visits to Bristol over the past five years, I have met scarcely half a dozen people outside the university who have heard of him. A few minutes after I first walked through the front door of the Bristol Records Office, in May 2003, I enquired of the bracingly confident assistant if she had any material on Paul Dirac; she looked at me quizzically and asked, ‘Who’s he?’
In the Records Office, the best way of finding out about Dirac’s early school years is to ask to see the well-fingered documents about his fellow pupil at Bishop Road School, Cary Grant. Local journalists and television crews were always ready to record Grant’s sojourns in the city, a prospect that would have frightened off Dirac; his visits were always anonymous. In the 1970s, however, he welcomed the campaign led by the local Member of Parliament William Waldegrave to celebrate the city’s association with him, an initiative that led to the founding of a mathematics prize in local secondary schools.1 Waldegrave had noticed that while Dirac is not well known by the people of Bristol, they were proud of their association with the charismatic engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, though he had not been born in the city or even lived there.
In 2006, Bristol’s veneration of Brunel was clear during a five-month celebration of the bicentenary of his birth. Local businesses and cultural organisations collaborated to present ‘Brunel 200’, an eight-month festival of exhibitions, theatrical events, concerts, art installations and poetry readings.2 Some forty thousand people – most of them from Bristol and the surrounding towns – attended the opening weekend in April. Four years before, the centenary of Dirac’s birth was marked in Bristol rather more modestly. The main event, organised by the University’s physics department, was an afternoon of lectures to celebrate Dirac’s life and legacy, followed by a formal dinner on Brunel’s SS Great Britain. Following an interview about the Dirac equation on Radio 4’s Start the Week, I was called by one of the organisers who asked me to give a lecture on Dirac’s life and work. This was a special moment for me as I had been fascinated by Dirac since I was a teenager.
I first heard his name on a suburban doorstep, when I was hawking subscriptions for a weekly raffle in aid of the Liberal Party in Orpington, a suburb in south-east London. When I was closing a sale on a spring evening in 1968, my new customer – a distracted, oddly engaging man by the name of John Bendall – mentioned perfunctorily that he was a theoretical physicist. We became friends, and, during several Sunday-morning chats in his front room, I realised that he was a Dirac fanatic: Ben
dall would find an excuse to introduce his hero’s name in every conversation lasting longer than a few minutes.3 I found out that it was no coincidence that the younger Bendall daughter, playing with her dolls at our feet, had been named Paula. Every Christmas, he would take a plate of mince pies from the kitchen, sit back in his armchair with a glass of sherry and read The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, savouring every sentence. Minutes after I first browsed through his copy, I knew I too wanted to be a theoretical physicist.
A few months later, it dawned on me that, when Dirac was a boy, he lived just a few miles from my Bristol-born paternal grandmother Amelia (‘Mill’) Jones. She was fond of telling me about that time in her life, when she worked in a corset factory. At weekends, she and her fiancé Charley – a docker, later my grandfather – would promenade arm in arm around the centre of the city, her expansive skirt almost touching the ground, his moustache daringly trimmed. ‘I wonder if we ever saw Cary Grant before he ’opped it to Americal?’ I heard her ask. She may well have set eyes on him around the city, perhaps around the Hippodrome, one of her haunts. It is also possible that she and my grandfather knew the high reputation of Charles Dirac and almost certain that they saw at least some members of the Dirac family, perhaps the two French-speaking brothers walking together.
In middle age, Dirac made several trips back to the city. In 1956, after a summer holiday in his mother’s home county of Cornwall, he returned through Bristol with his family and stopped outside 6 Julius Road to point out to his daughters Mary and Monica where he had lived since he was ten.4 But he said nothing about his memories of the twenty-five years he spent there. During my visits to Bristol, I lurked several times outside this unremarkable home, trying unsuccessfully to imagine my way into it. My problem was solved during a visit in the early summer of 2004, when the owner of the property generously invited me inside, allowing me to enter the theatre of Dirac’s most traumatic memories.5
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