8 Taylor Sen (1986).
9 Dirac, book review in the Cambridge Review, 6 February 1931.
10 Interview with von Weizsächer, AHQP, 9 June 1963, p. 19.
11 Private papers of Mary Dirac. Dirac wrote the notes on 17 January 1933.
12 Letter from Dirac to Isabel Whitehead, 6 December 1936, STJOHN.
13 Compte remarked that ‘The greatest problem, then, is to raise social feeling by artificial effort to the position which in the natural condition is held by selfish feeling.’ See http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Philosophy/Comte.htm (accessed 14 May 2008).
14 The headquarters of the Royal Society were then at Burlington House.
15 Bertha Swirles, Dirac’s former student colleague, described the talk as ‘sensational’ in her letter of 20 February 1933 to Dirac’s colleague Douglas Hartree. Hartree archive, 157, CHRIST’S.
16 Dirac was giving a technical talk at the London Mathematical Society on his favourite topic, ‘The Relation Between Classical and Quantum Mechanics’, at the Royal Astronomical Society in Burlington House, Dirac Papers, 2/26/18 (FSU).
17 The word was used in the 15 March issue of the Physical Review.
18 Quoted in Pais (1986: 363).
19 Interview with von Weizsächer, AHQP, 9 July 1963, p. 14.
20 Letter from Tamm to Dirac, 5 June 1933, in Kojevnikov (1996: 64–5).
21 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 14 May 1963, p. 31.
22 Letter from Pauli to Dirac, 1 May 1933, see Pais (1986: 360).
23 Galison (1994: 96).
24 Darrow (1934: 14).
25 Roqué (1997: 89–91).
26 Brown and Hoddeson (1983: 141).
27 Blackett (1955: 16).
28 Gell-Mann (1994: 179).
29 See the lecture Dirac gave in Leningrad on 27 September 1933 (Dalitz 1995: 721), Dirac’s Nobel Prize lecture in December 1933 and most of Dirac’s subsequent lectures on the positron.
30 Blackett (1969: xxxvii).
31 Gottfried (2002: 117).
32 Bohr’s support was sought by Kapitza. See the correspondence quoted in Kedrov (1984: 63–7).
33 The quote from Rutherford is from Kapitza’s letter to Bohr of 10 March 1933, quoted in Kedrov (1984: 63–4).
34 Anon., ‘Conservatism and the Young’, Cambridge Review, 28 April 1933, pp. 353–4.
35 The debate was held on 21 February 1933 and was reported in the Cambridge Evening News on the following day. See also Howarth (1978: 224–5).
36 Anon (1935); essay by Blackett (based on a radio broadcast in March 1934), pp. 129–44, see p. 130.
37 Werskey (1978: 168).
38 Werskey (1978: 148).
39 The Cambridge Review, 20 January 1933. The article alerted the Cambridge University community to the reservations expressed by the translators of Dirac’s book into Russian.
40 Anon. (1933) ‘The End of a Political Delusion’, Cambridge Left, 1 (1): 10–15; p. 12.
41 Daily Herald, 15 September 1933, p. 10. McGucken (1984: 40–1).
42 Letters to Dirac from his mother, 20 July and 22 July 1933, Dirac Papers, 1/4/3 (FSU).
43 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 8 August 1933, Dirac Papers 1/4/3 (FSU).
44 Postcards from Dirac to his mother, from September 1933 (DDOCS).
45 Letter from Dirac to Tamm, 19 June 1933, in Kojevnikov (1993: 67); see also the letter from Tamm to Dirac on 5 June 1933 (Kojevnikov 1993: 64).
46 Interview with Beck, AHQP, 22 April 1967, APS, p. 23.
47 The mansion was awarded to Bohr in December 1931, whereupon Bohr and his family moved in during the summer of 1932. The Bohrs’ first sleeping-over guests were Ernest Rutherford and his wife, who stayed there from 12 September to 22 September 1932. I thank Finn Aaserud and Felicity Pors for this information.
48 Parry (1968: 117).
49 Casimir (1983: 73–4). Letter from Dirac to Margrethe Bohr, 24 September 1933, NBA.
50 Letter from Dirac to Margrethe Bohr, 24 September 1933, NBA.
51 Letter from Dirac to Bohr, 20 August 1933, NBA.
52 Fitzpatrick (1999: 40–1).
53 Conquest (1986: Epilogue).
54 M. Dirac (1987: 4).
55 Anne Kox, ‘Een kwikkolom in de Westertoren: De Amsterdamse natuurkunde in de jaren dertig’, available online at http://soliton.science.uva. nl/~kox/jaarboek.html (14 May 2008).
56 Letter from Dirac to Bohr, 28 September 1933, NBA.
57 Letter from Margrethe Bohr to Dirac, 3 October 1933, NBA.
58 Letter from Ehrenfest to Bohr, Einstein and the physicists James Franck, Gustave Herglotz, Abram Joffé, Philipp Kohnstamm and Richard Tolman, 14 August 1933, NBA. Another suicide note, written on the day before Ehrenfest killed himself was unearthed in 2008: see Physics Today, June 2008, p. 26–7.
59 Roqué (1997: 101–2).
60 Letter from Heisenberg to Pauli, 6 February 1934, in Hermann et al. (1979).
61 Dirac mentioned his surprise to a reporter from the Daily Mirror. See the article on 13 November 1933.
62 Taylor (1987: 37).
63 The youngest experimenter to win the prize was, and remains, Lawrence Bragg, who won it when he was twenty-five. Dirac’s record as the youngest theoretician to win the prize was broken (by a margin of three months) in 1957 by T. D. Lee.
64 Reports on 10 November 1933 included the Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Manchester Guardian; the Daily Mirror reported on the following day.
65 Sunday Dispatch, 19 November 1933.
66 Letter from Dirac to Bohr, 28 November 1933, NBA.
67 Greenspan (2005: 242). Maurice Goldhaber remembers that when he remarked that Dirac’s award was ‘great news’, Born scowled. Interview with Maurice Goldhaber, 5 July 2006.
68 Cambridge Review, 17 November 1933; Brown (2005: 120). See also Stansky and Abrahams (1966: 210–13). A few days before the march, a few socialists and pacifists clashed with audiences leaving the Cambridge cinema Tivoli, after an evening showing of the patriotic movie Our Fighting Navy. The fight was the talk of the town and therefore guaranteed interest in the Armistice Day march.
Chapter eighteen
1 Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 146).
2 Information from RSAS, 14 September 2004.
3 The main sources of the material in this chapter are in the Dirac Papers (FSU): Letter to Dirac from his mother, 21 November 1933 (2/2/9). Florence Dirac’s account of her trip is in ‘My visit to Stockholm’ (1/2/9) and in a long, descriptive letter to Betty (2/2/9).
4 Reports in Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, both on 9 December 1933.
5 This was one of Dirac’s favourite stories about his absent-minded mother. It is well recounted in Kursunoglu (1987: 18).
6 Reports in the Stockholm newspapers Nya Dagligt Allehanda, 9 December 1933, Stockholms Dagblad, 10 December 1933.
7 Reports in the Stockholm newspapers Nya Dagligt Allehanda, 9 December 1933, Stockholms Dagblad, 10 December 1933.
8 Report in Dagens Nyheter, 11 December 1933.
9 Dagens Nyheter, 11 December 1933; Svenska Dagbladet, 11 December 1933.
10 Women guests were first invited to the banquet in 1909, when the female Swedish wirter Selma Lagerlöf won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
11 Dagens Nyheter, 11 December 1933; Svenska Dagbladet, 11 December 1933; Stockholms Tidningen, 11 December 1933.
12 See http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1933/dirac-speech.html (accessed 14 May 2008).
13 Annemarie Schrödinger notes ‘Stockholm 1933’, AHQP. Letter from Schrödinger to Dirac, 24 December 1933.
14 I thank Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta for identifying this error and clarifying its nature.
15 Flo Dirac, Dirac Papers, 1/2/9 (FSU) and 2/2/9 (FSU).
16 See http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1933/dirac-lecture.html (accessed 14 May 2008).
17 Schuster (1898a: 367); see also Schuster’s follow-up article (1898b).
18 Born (1978: 270). See also ‘Eamon de Valer
a, Erwin Schrödinger and the Dublin Institute’ (McCrea 1987).
19 Flo Dirac, Dirac Papers, 1/2/9 (FSU) and 2/2/9 (FSU).
20 Dirac read Abraham Pais’s book Subtle is the Lord, and remarked ‘Most interesting for its revelation of the working of Nobel Committee’, Dirac Papers, 2/32/12 (FSU). The book mentions that Einstein did not nominate Dirac for a Nobel Prize.
21 Nobel Committee papers, 1929 RSAS.
22 Apart from Bragg, only the comparatively little-known Polish physicist Czeslaw Bialobrzeski nominated Dirac in 1933. No other leading theorist had nominated him.
Chapter nineteen
1 Letter from Pauli to Heisenberg, 14 June 1934, reprinted in Hermann et al. (1979).
2 Schweber (1994: 128–9).
3 Letters from Oppenheimer to George Uhlenbeck, March 1934 and to Frank Oppenheimer, 4 June 1934, in Kimball Smith and Weiner (1980: 175, 181).
4 Interview with Dirac, AHQP, 6 May 1963, p. 8, Salam and Wigner (1972: 3–4). See also Peierls (1985: 112–13).
5 Letter from Rutherford to Fermi, AHQP, 23 April 1934.
6 ‘Peter Kapitza’, 22 June 34, KV 2/777, UKNATARCHI.
7 ‘Note on interview between Captain Liddell and Sir Frank Smith of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Old Queen Street’, 26 September 1934, KV 2/777. Jeffrey Hughes speculates that ‘VSO’ might be the Russian émigré I. P. Shirov (Hughes 2003).
8 Born (1978: 269–70).
9 I am grateful to Igor Gamow for making available home movies, shot in the 1920s, which show his mother dressed in this way.
10 The correspondence between Dirac and Rho Gamow is in Dirac Papers, 2/13/6 (FSU).
11 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 9 April 1935 (DDOCS).
12 Letter from Dirac to Rho Gamow, Dirac Papers, 2/2/10 (FSU).
13 Conversation with Lydia Jackson’s literary executor Rosemary Davidson, 8 January 2006.
14 Letter to Dirac from Lydia Jackson, 20 March 1934, Dirac Papers, 2/2/10 (FSU).
15 Fen (1976: 182).
16 Letter to Dirac from Lydia Jackson, 25 June 1934, Dirac Papers, 2/2/10 (FSU).
17 Letter to Dirac from Lydia Jackson, 5 February 1936, Dirac Papers, 2/3/3 (FSU).
18 Van Vleck (1972: 12–14).
19 The visitor was his sister Manci. M. Dirac (1987: 3–8; see p. 3).
20 The account of Dirac’s early courtship of Manci is taken mainly from M. Dirac (1987).
21 Letter to Dirac from Van Vleck, June 1936, Dirac Papers, 2/2/11 (FSU).
22 Dirac was living at 8 Morven Street. See the Dirac archive in IAS (1935).
23 Quoted in Jerome and Taylor (2005: 11).
24 Jerome and Taylor (2005: Chapters 2 and 5).
25 Blackwood (1997: 11).
26 Testimonies of Malcolm Robertson and Robert Walker, ‘The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s’, available at http://www34. homepage.villanova.edu/ robert.jantzen/princeton_math/pm02.htm (accessed 14 May 2008).
27 The Physical Review received the paper on 25 March 1935: Pais (1982: 454–7).
28 Blackwood (1997: 15–16).
29 Infeld (1941: 170).
30 See ‘The Princeton Mathematics Community in the 1930s’, in particular the interviews of Merrill Flood, of Robert Walker and of William Duren, Nathan Jacobson and Edward McShane.
31 Letter from Dirac to Max Newman, 17 March 1935, Newman archive STJOHN.
32 Dirac alludes to his memories of ice-cream sodas and lobster dinners with Manci in his letters to her of 2 May and 25 May 1935 respectively (DDOCS).
33 Manci was divorced from Richard Balázs on 20 September 1932. See Budapest’s archive of marriages, microfilm repository no A555, Inventory no 9643, Roll no 155. These papers tell us that Manci married Balázs on 27 February 1924.
34 Manci told her friend Lily Harish-Chandra of these relationships. Interview with Lily Harish-Chandra, 4 August 2006.
35 Wigner (1992: 34, 38–9).
36 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 2 September 1936 (DDOCS).
37 M. Dirac (1987: 4–5).
38 Letter to Dirac from Anna Kapitza, dated beginning December 1937, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.
39 Hendry (1984: 130).
40 A detailed account of Kapitza’s detention is in: Internal MI5 memo, signed GML, 11 October 3KV 2/777 (UKNATARCHI). See also the letters from Kapitza to his wife in Boag et al. (1990: Chapter 4).
41 For a full account of Rutherford’s campaign to secure Kapitza’s release, see Badash (1985), notably Chapter 2. See also Kojevnikov (2004: Chapter 5).
42 Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, 19 December 1934, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.
43 Dirac wrote of his vacation, without mentioning Manci, to Max Newman in a letter written on 13 January 1935 (Newman archive, STJOHN). The story of the alligator, which Gamow named Ni-Nilich, is related in letters from Dirac to Manci on 2 February, 29 March, 22 April and 2 May 1935 and in the letter from Manci to Dirac on 5 April 1935 (DDOCS). See also the letter from Gamow to Dirac, 25 March 1935, Dirac Papers, 2/3/1 (FSU).
44 Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, 14 March 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.
45 Letter from Rutherford to Bohr, 28 January 1935, Rutherford archive, UCAM.
46 Gardiner (1988: 240–8).
47 Gardiner (1988: 241).
48 Gardiner (1988: 242).
49 Kragh (1996: Chapter 2).
50 ‘Lemaître Follows Two Paths to Truth’, New York Times, 19 February 1933.
51 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 February 1935 (DDOCS).
52 Dirac had heard Lemaître speak at the Kapitza Club in about 1930. Dirac commented on this in a note he wrote on 1 September 1971: ‘There was much discussion about the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics. Lemaître emphasised his opinion that he did not believe God influenced directly the cause of atomic events’: Dirac Papers, 2/79/2 (FSU).
53 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 March 1935 (DDOCS).
54 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 May 1935 (DDOCS). Schnabel gave the concert on 7 March 1935.
55 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 10 March 1935 (DDOCS).
56 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 28 March 1935 (DDOCS).
57 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 29 March 1935 (DDOCS).
58 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 May 1935 (DDOCS).
59 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 9 May 1935 (DDOCS).
60 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 30 May 1935 (DDOCS).
61 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 4 March 1935 (DDOCS).
62 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 9 April 1935 (DDOCS).
63 Badash (1985: 29).
64 Badash (1985: 31).
65 Letter from Kapitza to his wife, 13 April 1935, quoted in Boag et al. (1990: 235).
66 Letter from Kapitza to his wife, 23 February 1935, quoted in Boag et al. (1990: 225).
67 Letter from Kapitza to his wife, 23 February 1935, quoted in Boag et al. (1990: 225, 226).
68 Kojevnikov (2004: 107).
69 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 2 May 1935 (DDOCS).
70 Lanouette (1992: 151); see also letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, 31 May 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.
71 Letter from K. T. Compton to the Soviet Ambassador, 24 April 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.
72 Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, 27 April 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.
73 ‘Embassy Occupied by Troyanovsky’, New York Times, 7 April 1934.
74 Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, 27 April 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.
75 Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, 27 April 1935.
Chapter twenty
1 Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, written from the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 14 May 1935. Copy of letter held by Alexei Kojevnikov.
2 Letter from Dirac to Anna Kapitza, written in Pasadena, 31 May 1935, copy held by Alexei Kojevnikov.
3 Crease and Mann (1986: 106); Serber (1998: 35–6).
4 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 4 June 1935 and 10 June 1935 (DDOCS).
5 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 1 August 1935 (DDOCS).
6 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 22 June 1935 (DDOCS).
7 Quoted in Brendon (2000: 241).
8 Letter from Kapitza to his wife, 30 July 1935, quoted in Boag et al. (1990: 251).
9 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 August 1935 (DDOCS).
10 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 30 September 1935 (DDOCS). See also Dirac, M. (1987: 6).
11 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 22 September 1935 (DDOCS).
12 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 23 October 1935 (DDOCS).
13 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 9 October 1935 (DDOCS).
14 Letters from Dirac to Manci, 3 October 1935 and 8 November 1935 (DDOCS).
15 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 17 November 1935 (DDOCS).
16 Letter to Dirac from Manci, 22 November 1935 (DDOCS).
17 Letter from Dirac to Manci, 3 October 1935 (DDOCS).
18 In Dirac’s letter to Manci on 6 February 1937, Dirac mentions that his father owned a copy of Shaw’s plays.
19 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 15 July 1934, Dirac Papers, 1/4/4 (FSU).
20 Dirac’s father’s notebook is in Dirac Papers, 1/1/10 (FSU). Charles dates his first entry September 1933. The latest date he referenced was 4 November 1935, so he probably ceased compiling the notes in early 1936.
21 Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 146).
22 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 4 August 1935, Dirac Papers, 1/4/5 (FSU).
23 Letter to Dirac from his mother, 4 August 1935, Dirac Papers, 1/4/5 (FSU).
24 Dalitz and Peierls (1986: 155–7).
25 Letter from Dirac to Tamm, 6 December 1935, in Kojevnikov (1996: 35–6).
26 One of the physicists who thought that Dirac was over-excited by the Shankland result was Hans Bethe, who wrote ‘What has happened to him?’ in a letter to Rudolf Peierls on 1 August 1936, in Lee (2007b: 152).
27 Dirac (1936: 804).
28 Letter from Heisenberg to Pauli, 23 May 1936, Vol. II, p. 442.
29 Letter from Einstein to Schrödinger, 23 March 1936, AHQP.
30 Letter from Schrödinger to Dirac, 29 April 1936, Dirac Papers, 2/3/3 (FSU).
31 Letter from Bohr to Kramers, 14 March 1936, NBA.
32 Letter from Dirac to Blackett, 12 February 1937, Blackett archive ROYSOC.
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