Overlooking the front garden is Charles’s tiny study, where he taught his private students, away from the gaze of the tax inspectors. Under the stairs is the tiny cupboard where Flo crouched during the German bombing raids, cotton wool in her ears. Above is the little bedroom where, a few months after Felix killed himself, Dirac first read Heisenberg’s path-breaking paper and realised that it contained the key to quantum physics. Felix’s bedroom, for many years a shrine, is now scattered with the toys and games of the children who occupy the room. Flo’s tiny kitchen overlooks the back garden, where Dirac had looked up at the stars and had watched some of the first British-made aeroplanes take off, and where he had begun to learn gardening during the Great War. It seemed barely possible that this suburban home had seen events that had left Dirac, as Manci had described him, ‘an emotional cripple’.6
Her words might sound cruel, but Dirac would probably have agreed that they were accurate. He always attributed his extreme taciturnity and stunted emotions to his father’s disciplinarian regime; but there is another, quite different explanation, namely that he was autistic. Two of Dirac’s younger colleagues confided in me that they had concluded this, each of them making their disclosure sotto voce, as if they were imparting a shameful secret. Both refused to be quoted. Yet one should be extremely careful about making this diagnosis: rather too often, people are labelled autistic on the flimsiest of evidence except that they are exceptionally reserved, focused and unsociable. Besides, it is not easy to psychoanalyse someone who is dead.
Before one can say whether there is a strong case that Dirac was a person with autism, it is important to be clear about the nature of the condition. For someone to be diagnosed as autistic, he or she must have all three of the following characteristics since early childhood:
1. Social skills are poorly developed compared with the development of other ‘classroom’ skills, such as reading and arithmetic.
2. The development of verbal and non-verbal communication is impaired compared with the development of other ‘classroom’ skills. Behavioural signs of repetitive or stereotyped movements, a delay in the acquisition of language and a lack of varied, spontaneous make-believe play.
3. An unusually narrow repertoire of activities and interests that are abnormally intense.7
A few days before the Nobel Prize ceremony in 1933, Flo told journalists that Dirac was a precocious, industrious and unusually quiet child.8 There is not nearly enough detail in her comments or in reports of Dirac’s behaviour at school to justify a diagnosis that he was then autistic. His behaviour as an adult, however, had all the characteristics that almost every autistic person has to some degree – reticence, passivity, aloofness, literal-mindedness, rigid patterns of activity, physical ineptitude, self-centredness and, above all, a narrow range of interests and a marked inability to empathise with other human beings. Extremes of these characteristics are at the root of the humour in almost all the tales about Dirac that physicists have been telling each other for decades: almost all of these ‘Dirac stories’ might also be called ‘autism stories’.
The word ‘autism’, derived from the Greek word autos for self, covers a wide spectrum of conditions, spanning people with mental retardation through to those like Dirac who are gifted in their specialist fields and often described as ‘high functioning’. An unusual case was dramatised in the Hollywood film Rain Man, where Dustin Hoffman portrays the autistic character Raymond Babbitt, who also has the much more rare Savant Syndrome, manifested in his prodigious arithmetic skills and in his amazing memory for baseball statistics and telephone numbers.
Clinicians believe just over half a million people in the UK are autistic to some degree, almost one in a hundred, and it is clear that it is predominantly a male condition. Statistical studies also show that depression is especially common among people with autism and that about 20 per cent of children with the condition speak fewer than five words a day.9 About one person with autism in ten has a special talent – for example, in drawing, working with computers or rote-memory learning. Another characteristic, yet to be properly quantified, is that young people with autism are exceptionally fussy about the food they are prepared to eat.10
There is currently a good deal of speculation of a modern-day epidemic of autism, especially in the USA, where, as Nature put it in 2007, the condition is the ‘golden child of the fundraising circuit’.11 But talk of a sudden rise in the number of people with autism is probably ill founded because diagnoses often differ from one doctor to another, with the result that the data have large uncertainties.12 Reliable information has been available only since the mid-1960s, when high-quality empirical studies began, long after Leo Kanner, an Austrian-born child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, first identified and named the condition in 1943. A year later, the Viennese psychiatrist Hans Asperger independently described a condition now known as Asperger’s Syndrome, part of the spectrum of autistic behaviour.13
Although the study of autism is developing rapidly, it is still in its infancy: like atomic physics in the early 1920s, there is a huge amount of observational information about the condition, but the experts know that their understanding of the data is only fragmentary. But some firm conclusions have emerged. A few decades ago, scientists believed that people with autism had some disorder of the mind, but it is now plain that this is incorrect: there is now overwhelming evidence that the condition is a disorder of the tissue in the brain.14 Using modern brain-imaging techniques – including positron emission tomography – clinicians have demonstrated that the regions linked with the process of ‘reading other people’s minds’ in the brains of people with autism are noticeably less active than in most other people.
Some of the most productive research into autism is now being done in Cambridge at the Autism Research Centre. Its director, Simon Baron-Cohen, is a pioneer of the idea that autism is a manifestation of the extreme male brain – comparatively weak in the typically female characteristic of empathy but strong in the typically male characteristic of systemising, such as working out how mechanical devices function, solving mathematical puzzles, poring over league tables and filing CDs.15 In one of Baron-Cohen’s research projects, he and his colleagues are studying the behaviour of leading mathematicians and scientists, many of whom – including Newton and Einstein, some believe – exhibit at least some of the traits of autism.16 The great majority of top mathematicians and physical scientists are undoubtedly male; this may indicate a predisposition of the male brain, though critics point out that it may also be a consequence of rearing children in ways that perpetuate sexual stereotypes.
When I visited Baron-Cohen in his rooms in Trinity College, I was struck by two remarks that seemed especially relevant to Dirac. First, he said that he had noticed the high proportion of autistic men who were in a stable marriage with a foreign wife, perhaps because the women were more tolerant of unusual behaviour in foreign men than in men from their own culture. Baron-Cohen had no idea that Dirac was married for almost fifty years to a Hungarian. That, of course, could be a coincidence. I was taken aback again by another remark he made a few minutes later, however, when he pointed out that although people with strongly autistic personalities appear to be detached from most other people, when they believe that a friend has suffered an injustice, they are often so indignant that they will disrupt or abandon their almost invariable daily routines to rectify it.17 Baron-Cohen knew nothing of Dirac’s one venture into international politics when he spent a few months concentrating on the campaign to free Kapitza from his detention in the Soviet Union. Heisenberg, pilloried by many of his former colleagues after the war, had cause to regard Dirac as one of his most loyal friends. Again, these may be coincidences.
But Baron-Cohen argues that it is not happenstance that the young Dirac bloomed in 1920s Cambridge:
Cambridge was a niche where his eccentricity would have been tolerated and his skills valued. College life provided him with a regular daily routine and e
verything he needed. His bed was made for him, food was provided for him. High Table in College would have provided social contact if he wanted it, with its own rules and routines to render it highly predictable. In the mathematics department, he would have been free to do as he wished, he was surrounded by like-minded people, with no pressure to socialise. An environment like this would have been optimal for someone like Dirac.18
A fruitful source of insights into autism is the American business executive and teacher Temple Grandin, who describes herself to be ‘a high-functioning person with autism’.19 In her books and articles, Grandin stresses two particular aspects of her personality that she shares with most other autistic people; both are characteristics that Dirac shared. First, she is hypersensitive to sudden sounds, bringing to mind the great care Dirac always took to ensure that he would not be disturbed by chiming bells or by the sudden barks of neighbourhood dogs. Second, she points out that she thinks visually and that, in several respects, her brain does not function like those of most people she has met.
Here’s how my brain works: It’s like the search engine Google for images. If you say the word ‘love’ to me, I’ll surf the Internet inside my brain. Then, a series of images pops into my head. What I’ll see, for example, is a picture of a mother horse with a foal, or I think of Herbie the Lovebug, scenes from the movie Love Story or the Beatles song… ‘All you need is Love’.20
Like Temple Grandin, Dirac was certain that his mind was ‘essentially a geometrical one’.21 He was always uneasy with algebraic approaches to physics and with any mathematical process he could not picture – one of the reasons why he was so uncomfortable with renormalisation.
Yet again, it is possible that this correlation between autistic characteristics and Dirac’s behaviour is a coincidence, but, in the light of other such correlations, this seems unlikely. I believe it to be all but certain that Dirac’s behavioural traits as a person with autism were crucial to his success as a theoretical physicist: his ability to order information about mathematics and physics in a systematic way, his visual imagination, his self-centredness, his concentration and determination. These traits certainly do not explain his talent but they give some insight into his unique way of looking at the world.
One of the strongest clues about the true nature of autism is that the condition has a genetic component – it runs in families. The theory, although powerful, cannot predict with the precision of a theory in physics how most characteristics are passed down the generations, especially for conditions such as autism, associated with several genes. Observational studies show that it is rare for families to have more than one child with autism, though the probability that a second child will be autistic is about one in twenty, almost eight times the usual likelihood. This raises the question of whether Felix Dirac was autistic. Again, it is impossible to say one way or the other because too little information about his personality survives. I was, however, given pause for thought one evening during my visit to the family’s genealogist, Gisela Dirac. As she surveyed the family tree, she remarked, ‘It’s amazing how many people in the family had acute depression. And how many killed themselves.’ At my request, she later sent me a family tree annotated with such instances: in the previous century, there had been at least six.
Charles Dirac also showed signs of autistic behaviour. Most of the descriptions of him by his colleagues and students refer to his self-centredness, his dedication to work and his rigid teaching methods. Like his son Paul, Charles appears to have had only a modest ability to understand other people’s feelings, but whereas lack of empathy in Paul was manifest in his reserve, in Charles it seems to have appeared as a tendency to behave like a human bulldozer. Neither man was ever going to be the easiest of husbands to live with: Flo’s teenage infatuation with the charming Swiss man she met in the library had led to a wretchedly unhappy union, whereas Manci somehow found ways of living stably with a man few women would contemplate as an acceptable partner for a second.
Dirac was aware that he was in some ways similar to his father. Three months after Charles died in June 1936, Manci suggested to Paul that he thought too much about these similarities and that he might unconsciously be seeking to emulate some of his father’s habits.22 Shortly afterwards, Paul had pondered on his father’s biological inheritance when he attended Bohr’s conference on genetics and heard in detail about genetic characteristics and how they are passed from one generation to the next. Sitting on one of the wooden benches in the lecture theatre of Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, listening to the lectures, Dirac may well have wondered which of these heritable characteristics were written into his own genes.
Whatever their genetic profiles, there is no doubt that Dirac and his father were incompatible. Having heard so much about the harrowing mealtimes together, I found myself shuddering when I first walked into the dark dining room of 6 Julius Road overlooking the back garden. The original fireplace is still there. It was easy to imagine Flo passing bowls of steaming porridge from the kitchen through the hatch in the dividing wall and urging the worryingly thin Paul not to leave a morsel uneaten. Although he had a weak appetite, one of the symptoms of tuberculosis, his parents seem not to have suspected that he had the disease and so had no reservations about putting him under pressure to consume much more food than he wanted to eat.23
The elderly Dirac remembered this dining room as a torture chamber. It was here, he said many times, that his father drove him into a life of silence and inhibition – the young Dirac, forced to speak French, found it easier to say nothing than to make errors that his father would punish unmercifully. No one else in the family left an account of these mealtimes, so we shall probably never know if he was exaggerating. Nor are we ever likely to know what his parents felt about the problems of bringing up a child who was both precociously clever and emotionally withdrawn.24 From a modern perspective, Charles and Flo were coping with a challenge they did not know they faced, one that may well have made their marital problems even worse. If they were living in Bristol today, the city council would – like most local authorities in the UK – give them support and enable their son to go to a special school.
I for one accept the testimony of Paul Dirac and his mother that Charles Dirac was a domineering and insensitive father, though I don’t believe he bullied his younger son into taciturnity. Much more likely, it seems to me, is that the relationship between Paul and Charles was doomed by nature rather than nurture: the young Dirac was born to be a child of few words and was pitiably unable to empathise with others, including his closest family. He laid all the blame for this at the feet of his father, though he disliked him for other reasons, too, with a bitterness that surprised the few people – including Kurt Hofer – who saw the extent of it. ‘Why was Paul so bitter, so obsessed with his father?’ Hofer wondered after hearing his outburst. Perhaps the main reason was that Dirac knew in his heart he was not just his own man but, inescapably, his father’s.
Notes - Chapter thirty
1 The prize was funded by Rolls Royce and British Aerospace. William Waldegrave recalls that Dirac supported this prize and asked him to send photographs of the Bishop Road School, where his formal education began.
2 I am grateful to Laura Thorne, of Brunel 200, for details about the programme.
3 These details and others in this paragraph were confirmed in a telephone conversa tion with John Bendall, 18 October 2007.
4 Interview with Mary Dirac, 10 August 2006.
5 This visit took place on 22 June 2004. Don Carleton, a historian of Bristol, kindly arranged it.
6 Letter from Manci to ‘Anna’, 15 October 1986, in PRINCETON, Wigner archive (Margit Dirac file).
7 These three statements are based on the more rigorous ones given by the autism expert Uta Frith in her definitive introduction to the condition (2003: 8–9). Her statements are consistent with the most detailed and most recent scheme described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Associati
on (2000), 4th edition, Washington DC, and a similar scheme issued by the World Health Organization, ‘The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders: Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Guidelines’ (1992).
8 Stockholms Dagblad, 10 December 1933.
9 Walenski et al. (2006: 175); for the data on depression see p. 9.
10 Wing (1996: 47, 65 and 123).
11 Anon. (2007) ‘Autism Speaks: The United States Pays Up’, Nature, 448: 628–9; see p. 628.
12 Frith (2003: Chapter 4).
13 Unlike people with autism, people with Asperger’s Syndrome show a delay neither in acquiring language when they are young nor in other aspects of intellectual development. But people with Asperger’s Syndrome, when they are older, have similar social impairments to people with autism. See Frith (2003: 11).
14 Frith (2003: 182).
15 Interview with Simon Baron-Cohen, 9 July 2003; Baron-Cohen (2003: Chapters 3 and 5).
16 Fitzgerald (2004: Chapter 1).
17 Frith (2003: 112).
18 E-mail from Simon Baron-Cohen 25 December 2006.
19 Grandin (1995: 137).
20 Park (1992: 250–9); Temple Grandin’s quote is from Morning Edition, US National Public Radio, 14 August 2006. See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/ story.php? storyId=5628476 (accessed 16 August 2006).
21 Dirac (1977: 140).
22 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 2 September 1936, DDOCS.
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