10 Louis Dirac was the illegitimate son of the recently widowed Annette Vieux, who gave him her maiden name Giroud. Only later, when the baby’s parents settled down together, did he take the surname of his father, Dirac; otherwise, his physicist grandson would have been called not Paul Dirac but Paul Giroud. Source: civil records in St Maurice, Switzerland. Louis Dirac’s paeans to the beauty of the Alpine countryside are still in print, though rarely read. His poetry is published in Bioley (1903).
11 Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 140).
12 The pine cones are against a blue background; the leopard and clover are against a silver background (http://www.dirac.ch/diracwappen.html). After the first member of the Dirac family obtained citizenship in the town of Saint Maurice, Swiss law accorded the same rights of citizenship to succeeding generations.
13 This letter was written from Flo to Charles on 27 August 1897. This and the other extant letters from their correspondence are in Dirac Papers 1/1/8 (FSU). I am taking the arrival of e-mail for the UK public to be c. 1995.
14 Felix’s full name was Reginald Charles Félix. His mother always anglicised his name, so I shall use that version of it here.
15 The Diracs’ address was 15 Monk Road, Bishopston, Bristol. The house still stands. The date of the Diracs’ move are in UKNATARCHI HO/144/1509/374920.
16 The details of Dirac’s birth are given in a letter from Flo to Paul and Manci, 18 December 1939, Dirac Papers, 1/5/1 (FSU). The description of Dirac as ‘rather small’ and the colour of his eyes is given in the poem ‘Paul’, Dirac Papers, 1/2/12 (FSU). Charles gave his children names used in his mother’s family, the Pottiers. The origins of his children’s names are as follows: Reginald Charles Felix was named after himself and after his grandfather Felix Jean Adrien Pottier; Paul Adrien Maurice’s second name was that of Charles’s maternal grandfather Pottier, and Maurice is probably in memory of his native town, Saint Maurice; Beatrice Isabelle Marguerite Walla’s last name came from Charles’s mother Julie Antoinette Walla Pottier, and she was probably named after Flo’s sister Beatrice.
17 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 18 December 1939, Dirac Papers, 1/4/9 (FSU).
18 Sunday Dispatch, 19 November 1933 (p. 17).
19 On 16 May 1856, the Bristol Times and Mirror called the area ‘the people’s park’ soon after the council had taken the popular step in the early 1860s of acquiring it from its owners, who included the Merchant Venturers’ Society.
20 Mehra and Rechenberg (1982: 7n). The authors point out that Dirac checked the information they included about his early life.
21 Dirac Papers, 1/1/12 (FSU).
22 Dirac Papers, 1/1/9 (FSU).
23 In the Dirac family archive, there is a copy of one of these postcards, marked by Charles Dirac on the back with the date 3 September 1907, presumably the date on which the photograph was taken (DDOCS).
24 The friends were Esther and Myer Salaman, see Salaman and Salaman (1986: 69). The Salamans comment that Dirac read their account of his memories and verified them. For the earlier interview with AHQP on 4 April 1962, see p. 6.
25 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 4 April 1962; Salaman and Salaman (1986).
26 Dirac told his daughter Mary that his parents always denied him a glass of water at the dinner table: interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.
27 Letter from Dirac to Manci Balázs, 7 March 1936 (DDOCS).
28 Letter from Dirac to Manci Balázs, 9 April 1935 (DDOCS).
29 The school-starting age of five was introduced in the 1870 Education Act. Dirac’s mother was in the first generation to benefit from compulsory education in England. Woodhead (1989: 5).
30 Detail about the late serving of breakfast from Manci Dirac to Gisela Dirac in August 1988 in caslano, Ticino. Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.
31 Details of the Bishop Road School in this period are available in the Head Teacher’s report, in the BRISTRO archive: ‘Bishop Road School Log Book’ (21131/SC/BIR/L/2/1).
32 The source of these comments is family photos of the Dirac brothers and data on the boys’ heights obtained when they were at school (see Felix’s records in Dirac Papers, 1/6/1, FSU). In November 1914, Felix’s height was five feet four inches, and his weight was one hundred and ten pounds, whereas Paul’s height was four feet ten inches and his weight was sixty-six and a half pounds. Two years earlier, when Felix had the same age as Paul in late 1914, he was about the same height as his brother but was some twenty pounds heavier.
33 Felix’s school reports (1908–12) are in Dirac Papers, 1/6/1 (FSU).
34 The description of Dirac as ‘a cheerful little schoolboy’ is given in his mother’s poem ‘Paul’ in Dirac Papers, 1/2/12 (FSU).
35 See ‘Report cards’ in Dirac Papers, 1/10/2 (FSU).
36 Quoted in Wells (1982: 344). As an adult, Dirac did not add a letter L to the ends of words that end in the letter A, but he did have the characteristic practice among Bristolians of warmly accentuating the letter R; for example, in his pronunciation of ‘universe’.
37 Dirac’s school reports are in Dirac Papers, 1/10/2 (FSU).
38 Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.
39 Interview with Flo Dirac, Svenska Dagbladet, 10 December 1933.
40 The technique, applied to engineering, became popular in Renaissance Florence. The architect ‘Pipo’ Brunelleschi used such drawings to help his clients visualise the buildings and artefacts and to give his assistants a set of instructions so that they could do their work in his absence.
41 In 1853, the first report of Sir Henry Cole’s Department of Practical Art urged teachers to give the students exercises that ‘contain some of the choicest elements of beauty, such as elegance of line, proportion and symmetry’ (minutes of the Committee of the Council of Education [1852–3], HMSO, pp. 24–6). Aesthetic recommendations like this continued unabated in reports and guides to teaching for decades. In 1905, the Government’s Board of Education stressed to junior schoolteachers that ‘the scholar should be taught to perceive and appreciate beauty of form and colour. The feeling for beauty should be cherished, and treated as a serious school matter.’ See Board of Education (1905).
42 Gaunt (1945: Chapters 1 and 2). The Aesthetic Movement was not the first flowering of the importance of beauty in British cultural life. For example, in the eighteenth century, it was important for people of taste to refer to the concept of beauty to demonstrate that they were cultured and intellectually distinguished. See Jones (1998). In 1835, Gautier defined the essence of aestheticism in the preface to one of his novels: ‘Nothing is beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need and the needs of a man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and weak nature. The most useful place in the house is the lavatory.’ Quoted in Lambourne (1996: 10).
43 Hayward (1909: 226–7).
44 Examples of Dirac’s early technical drawings are in Dirac Papers, 1/10/2 (FSU). In one drawing, he gives an idealised image of a small building, showing two of its four vertical sides, this time taking full account of the perspective. Dirac underlines his understanding of perspective by showing that parallel lines on each side all meet at a single point in the far distance.
45 The Government’s Board of Education had recommended: ‘No angular system of handwriting should be taught and all systems which sacrifice legibility and a reasonable degree of speed to supposed beauty should be eschewed,’ Board of Education (1905: 69).
46 Government report on inspection on 10–12 February 1914, reported in the log book of Bishop Road School, stored in BRISTRO: ‘Bishop Road School Log Book’ (21131/SC/BIR/L/2/1).
47 Westfall (1993: 13).
48 Betty refers to her skating at the Coliseum rink in her letter to Dirac, 29 January 1937 (DDOCS).
49 ‘Paul’, a poem by his mother, Dirac Papers, 1/2/12 (FSU). The relevant lines are: ‘At eight years old in quiet nook / Alone, he stays, conning a book / On table high, voice strong and sweet / Poems of length he would repea
t.’
50 Interview with Flo Dirac in Svenska Dagbladet, 10 December 1933.
51 ‘Recollections of the Merchant Venturers’, 5 November 1980, Dirac Papers 2/16/4 (FSU).
52 Salaman and Salaman (1986: 69).
53 Dirac’s scholarship covered his expenses at his next school, rising from £8 in the first year (1914–15) to £15 in the final year (1917–18). BRISTRO, records of the Bishop Road School, 21131/EC/Mgt/Sch/1/1.
54 Winstone (1972) contains dozens of photographs of Bristol during the period 1900–14.
55 Interview with Mary Dirac, 14 February 2004.
56 Dirac Papers, 1/10/6 (FSU). The lectures were held at the Merchant Venturers’ Technical College, where Dirac would later study.
57 Testimony of H. C. Pratt, who attended Bishop Road School from 1907 to 1912, to Richard Dalitz in the mid-1980s.
Chapter two
1 Words by H. D. Hamilton (School Captain, 1911–13). This is the second verse of the song.
2 Lyes (n. d.: 5).
3 Pratten (1991: 13).
4 The following recollections were given to Richard Dalitz. Leslie Phillips attended the Merchant Venturer’s School from 1915 to 1919. Some of Charles’s codes are extant in Dirac Papers, 1/1/5 (FSU). In 1980, Dirac described his father’s reputation in Dirac Papers, 2/16/4 (FSU).
5 Interview with Mary Dirac, 7 February 2003.
6 These comics, named after the ‘penny stinker’ (a cheap and nasty cigar), first became popular in the 1860s and were still popular in Dirac’s youth. They were widely frowned upon for their lack of seriousness.
7 Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.
8 Bryder (1988: 1 and 23). See also Bryder (1992: 73).
9 Interview with Mary Dirac, 26 February 2004.
10 Dirac’s reports when he was at the Merchant Venturers’ School are in Dirac Papers, 1/10/7 (FSU).
11 See, for example, the reports of the Government’s Department of Science and Art, from 1854, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.
12 Stone and Wells (1920: 335–6).
13 Stone and Wells (1920: 357).
14 Stone and Wells (1920: 151).
15 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 1.
16 Testimony to Richard Dalitz of J. L. Griffin, one of Dirac’s fellow students in the chemistry class.
17 Daily Herald, 17 February 1933, p. 1.
18 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 2.
19 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 2.
20 Dirac remarked that he ‘was very interested in the fundamental problems of nature. I would spend much time just thinking about them’. See Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 2.
21 Dirac (1977: 11); interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, pp. 2–3.
22 Wells (1895: 4).
23 See, for example, Monica Dirac, ‘My Father’, in Baer and Belyaev (2003).
24 Pratten (1991: 24).
25 Dirac (1977: 112).
26 Testimony of Leslie Roy Phillips (fellow pupil with Dirac at Merchant Venturers’ School, 1915–19) given to Richard Dalitz in the 1980s.
27 Dirac Papers, 2/16/4 (FSU).
28 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 2.
29 Later, Dirac received more books as prizes at the Merchant Venturers’ School, including Decisive Battles of the World and Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, an adventure story set in tsarist Russia. Some of the books Dirac won for school prizes at the Merchant Venturers’ School are stored in the Dirac Library at Florida State University. Other information about Dirac’s reading choices is from his niece Christine Teszler.
30 Letter from Edith Williams to Dirac, 15 November 1952, Dirac Papers, 2/4/8 (FSU).
31 From Merchant Venturers’ School yearbooks 1919, BRISTRO 40659, 1.
32 Stone and Wells (1920: 360).
33 In the spring of 1921, Dirac planned the planting of vegetables on what looks like a geometric drawing of the garden in 6 Julius Road, with some annotations by his father. The plan, dated 24 April 1921, is in Dirac Papers, 1/8/24 (FSU).
34 The Bishopston local Norman Jones told Richard Dalitz in the mid-1980s that his most vivid memory of Charles was ‘seeing him always carrying an umbrella, struggling up the hill, often with his daughter, of whom he was very fond’, interviews with Richard Dalitz, private communication.
35 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962. Felix’s reports when he was at the Merchant Venturers’ School are in Dirac Papers, 1/6/4 (FSU).
36 Quoted in Holroyd (1988: 81–3).
37 Interview with Monica Dirac, 7 February 2003; interview with Leopold Halpern, 18 February 2003.
38 The Merchant Venturers’ School used the facilities during the day, and the college used them during the evening.
39 See Felix’s university papers in Dirac Papers, 1/6/8 (FSU); the scholarships are recorded in BRISTRO 21131/EC/Mgt/sch/1/1.
40 Dirac took the qualifying examinations for the University of Bristol in 1917, three years earlier than most other applicants. He then spent a year studying advanced mathematics and finally qualified in ‘physics, chemistry, mechanics, geometrical and mechanical drawing and additional mathematics’, enabling him to take a degree in any technical subject. See Dirac Papers, 1/10/13 (FSU); details of Dirac’s matriculation are also in a letter to him from his friend Herbert Wiltshire, 10 February 1952, Dirac Papers, 2/4/7 (FSU).
41 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 7.
42 Interview with Flo Dirac, Svenska Dagbladet, 10 December 1933.
Chapter three
1 Stone and Wells (1920: 371–2).
2 Bristol Times and Mirror, 12 November 1918, p. 3.
3 ‘Recollections of Bristol University’, Dirac Papers, 2/16/3 (FSU).
4 Lyes (n. d.: 29). At the Dolphin Street picture house, for example, Fatty Arbuckle starred in The Butcher Boy.
5 Quoted in Sinclair (1986).
6 Dirac Papers, 2/16/3 (FSU).
7 The list of textbooks that Dirac studied as an engineering student is in Dirac Papers, 1/10/13 and 1/12/1 (FSU).
8 BRISTU, papers of Charles Frank. ‘[N] ot the faintest idea’ is the testimony of Mr S. Holmes, a lecturer in electrical engineering, given to G. H. Rawcliffe, who, in turn, passed it to Charles Frank on 3 May 1973.
9 Papers of Sir Charles Frank, BRISTU. ‘Even as an engineering student, he spent much time reading in the Physics Library,’ wrote Frank in a note in 1973.
10 The college had classes on Saturday mornings as well as during weekdays (as was traditional, Wednesday afternoons were usually free for sporting activities). Information on Dirac at the Merchant Venturers’ College is in the college’s Year Books (BRISTRO 40659/1). Dirac’s student number was 1429.
11 Letter to Dirac from Wiltshire, 4 May 1952, Dirac Papers, 2/4/7 (FSU). The first two names of Wiltshire, known to most people as Charlie, were Herbert Charles.
12 Dirac Papers, 2/16/3 (FSU).
13 Dirac Papers, 2/16/3 (FSU).
14 Interview with Leslie Warne, 30 November 2004.
15 Records of the Merchant Venturers’ Technical College, BRISTRO.
16 The photograph shows the visit of the University Engineering Society’s visit to Messrs. Douglas’ Works, Kingswood, 11 March 1919, Dirac Papers, 1/10/13 (FSU).
17 ‘Miscellaneous collection, FH Dirac’, September 1915, Dirac Papers, 1/2/2 (FSU).
18 Testimony to Richard Dalitz by E. B. Cook, who taught with Charles from 1918 to 1925.
19 Testimony to Richard Dalitz by W. H. Bullock, who joined the Cotham Road School staff in 1925 and was later Charles’s successor as Head of the French Department.
20 Charles Dirac’s letter is reproduced in Michelet (1988: 93).
21 See Charles Dirac’s Certificate of Naturalization, Dirac Papers, 1/1/3 (FSU). The papers concerning Charles Dirac’s application for British citizenship are in UKNATARCHI HO/144/1509/374920.
22 Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.
23 Interv
iew with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 6.
24 Letter to Dirac from Wiltshire, 10 February 1952, Dirac Papers, 2/4/7 (FSU).
25 Dirac (1977: 110).
26 Sponsel (2002: 463).
27 Dirac (1977: 110).
28 Five shillings (25 pence) secured a copy of Easy Lessons in Einstein by Dr E. L. Slosson, a guinea (£1.05) The Reign of Relativity by Viscount Haldane.
29 Eddington (1918: 35–9).
30 Dirac Papers, 1/10/14 (FSU).
31 Testimonies of Dr J. L. Griffin, Dr Leslie Roy Phillips and E. G. Armstead, provided to Richard Dalitz.
32 Letter to Dirac from his mother, undated but written at the beginning of his sojourn in Rugby, c. 1 August 1920, Dirac Papers, 1/3/1 (FSU).
33 Rugby and Kineton Advertiser, 20 August 1920.
34 Letters to Dirac from his mother, August and September 1920, especially 30 August and 15 September (FSU).
35 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 7.
36 Letter from G. H. Rawcliffe, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Bristol to Professor Frank on 3 May 1973. BRISTU, archive of Charles Frank.
37 Broad (1923: 3).
38 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 1 April 1962, p. 4 and 7.
39 Schilpp (1959: 54–5). I have replaced Broad’s archaic term ‘latches’ with ‘laces’.
40 Broad (1923: 154). This book is based on the course of lectures that Broad gave to Dirac and his colleagues. Broad prepared all his lectures meticulously and wrote them out in advance, making it easy for him to publish them. What we read in this book is therefore likely to be the material that Broad presented to Dirac.
41 Broad (1923: 486).
42 Broad (1923: 31).
43 Dirac (1977: 120).
44 Dirac (1977: 111).
45 Schultz (2003: Chapters 18 and 19).
46 Galison (2003: 238).
47 Skorupski (1988).
48 Mill (1892). His most important comments about the nature of science are in Book 2 and in Book 3 (Chapter 21).
49 Dirac (1977: 111).
50 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 6.
51 See http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi426.htm (accessed 27 May 2008).
52 Nahin (1987: 27, n. 23). Heaviside never completed his autobiography.
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