35 Many female acquaintances attest to Dirac’s behaviour in this respect, notably Lily Harish-Chandra, Rae Roeder, Helaine Blumenfeld and Colleen Taylor Sen.
36 Kursunoglu and Wigner (1987: 26). See Mill (1869), especially Chapter 3, ‘Of Individuality, as One of the Elements of Well-Being’.
37 Interview with Kurt Hofer, 21 February 2004.
38 E-mail from Kurt Hofer, 6 March 2004.
39 Letter from Manci to Rudolf Peierls, 23 December 1985, Peierls archive, additional papers, D23 (BOD).
40 Interview with Christine Teszler, 22 January 2004, and an e-mail, 27 March 2004.
41 This incident occurred in 1978 as Dirac and Hofer passed the Mormon church on Stadium Drive, Tallahassee. Interview with Hofer, 21 February 2004.
42 Talk on ‘Fundamental Problems of Physics’, 29 June 1971 (audio recording from LINDAU). See Dirac Papers, 2/28/23 (FSU).
43 In the talk, Dirac suggested a probability for the formation of life that he considered would make it overwhelmingly unlikely without the presence of a God: a chance of one in 10100 (a power of ten also known as a googol).
44 E-mail from Kurt Hofer, 28 August 2006.
45 Halpern (1988: 466 n.). See also Dirac’s notes on his lecture ‘A Scientist’s Attitude to Religion’, c. 1975, Dirac Papers, 2/32/11A (FSU).
46 Isenstein contacted Dirac after meeting him at Bohr’s home: letter from Isenstein to Dirac, 29 June 1939, Dirac Papers, 2/3/9 (FSU). Isenstein renewed contact with Dirac in 1969, see letter from Isenstein to Dirac, 29 June 1969, Dirac Papers, 2/6/7 (FSU).
47 For correspondence concerning the bust, see the correspondence in the summer of 1971, Dirac Papers, 2/6/11 (FSU).
48 I thank Michael Noakes for his comments on Dirac’s sitting for this portrait (interview, 3 July 2006). Noakes points out that Frank Sinatra did not sit for his portrait, though he much liked the result, which he hung on a wall of his study.
49 Dirac liked the picture, though he grumbled slightly: ‘It makes me look a bit old.’ Dirac was sensitive about the mark on the left side of his nose, the remains of a precancerous cyst, removed in the summer of 1977. For this reason, Noakes’s portrait of Dirac shows only the right side of his face. Dirac looked rather more resolute in the two chalk drawings by Howard Morgan in 1980, commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery.
50 Feynman’s drawing is reproduced in the frontispiece of Kursunoglu and Wigner (1987). An example of Feynman’s ‘I’m no Dirac’ is in interview by Charles Weiner of Richard Feynman, 28 June 1966, p. 187 (CALTECH).
51 Lord Waldegrave points out that ‘the award was largely the result of the intervention of Victor Rothschild, the late Lord Rothschild, who was well placed at that time as a Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office as Head of the Central Policy Review Staff of Prime Minister Edward Heath’ (interview with Lord Waldegrave, 2 June 2004).
52 Letter from Manci to Barbara Gamow, 1 May 1973, LC.
53 Salaman and Salaman (1986: 70). Dirac raised this issue in the context of the experience of his daughter Monica, who ‘had studied geology but had given it up to look after her baby’.
54 Interview with Mary Dirac, 21 February 2003.
55 Interview with Leopold Halpern, 18 February 2003.
56 The British part of the project was eventually delivered by the British Aircraft Corporation in collaboration with the French company Sud Aviation, following an agreement signed in 1962. The British Aircraft Corporation had been formed in 1960 from the Bristol Aeroplane Company and other aeronautical firms. I thank Andrew Nahum for advice on this.
57 The Diracs flew from Dulles to Paris on 5 May 1979 (DDOCS). Letters to Dirac from Abdul-Razzak Kaddoura, Assistant Director-General for Science at UNESCO, dated 29 March 1979, are in Dirac Papers, 2/9/3 (FSU).
58 New York Times, 5 May 1979.
59 A copy of the speech is in Dirac Papers, 1/3/8 (FSU).
60 Kapitza wrote to Dirac on 18 February 1982, ‘Knowing of your going will certainly stimulate my travelling,’ Dirac Papers, 2/10/6 (FSU).
61 A recording of Dirac’s 1982 talk to the Lindau meeting, ‘The Requirements of a Basic Physical Theory’ (1 July 1982), and other details are available at LINDAU.
62 Details of the accommodation are in Dirac Papers, 2/10/7 (FSU).
63 Interview with Kurt Hofer, 21 February 2004; interview with Leopold Halpern, 26 February 2006.
64 Dirac gave this lecture on 15 August 1981, Dirac Papers, 2/29/45 (FSU).
65 The Erice Statement is readily available on the internet.
66 On 7 December 1982, Dirac wrote to the Master of St John’s to apologise for not being able to attend a gathering at college on 27 December to toast Dirac’s health in his eightieth year: ‘For 59 years, the College has been the central point of my life and a home to me’ (STJOHN).
67 Interview with Peter Goddard, 7 June 2006.
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 Dalit
z, 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.
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 Association (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.
23 ‘Many patients with tuberculosis present with general symptoms, such as tiredness, malaise, loss of appetite, weakness or loss of weight’: Seaton et al. (2000: 516).
24 There are insights into the childhood of autistic children in the memoir of Gunilla Gerland (translated by Joan Tate), A Real Person: Life on the Outside. Gerland writes powerfully of her perception of the misunderstandings in her early relationship with her parents, notably with her father. ‘He had no respect for anyone’s needs […] The effect of my father’s actions was one of pure sadism, although he was not really a sadist. He didn’t enjoy my humiliation in itself – he couldn’t even imagine it’ (Gerland 1996). See also Grandin (1984).
Chapter thirty-one
1 Weinberg wrote these words for me to read aloud at the Centenary meeting. Text checked by Weinberg, 22 July 2007 (e-mail).
2 Interview with Freeman Dyson, 27 June 2005.
3 Quoted in Charap (1972: 332).
4 E-mail from Sir Michael Atiyah, 15 July 2007.
5 Woolf (1980: 502).
6 Letter from Dirac to Abdus Salam, 11 November 1981, reproduced in Craigie et al. (1983: iii).
7 ’t Hooft (1997: Chapter 14).
8 Stephen Hawking appeared in an episode of Star Trek first broadcast on 21 June 1993, and in episodes of The Simpsons first broadcast on 9 May 1999 and 1 May 2005.
9 Letter from Nicolas Kurti to New Scientist, 65 (1975), p. 533; letter from E. C. Stern (1975) to Science, 189, p. 251. See also the comments by Dalitz in ‘Another Side to Paul Dirac’, in Kursunoglu and Wigner (1987: 87–8).
10 Freimund et al. (2001). The Kaptiza–Dirac effect had been observed for atoms, but not for electrons, in 1986 (Gould et al. 1986). I thank Herman Betelaan for his advice on modern experiments on the effect.
11 Deser (2003: 102).
12 Interview with Nathan Seiberg, 26 July 2007, and e-mail, 20 August 2007.
13 In his interviews, Leopold Halpern often stressed the importance to Dirac of the large numbers hypothesis (interview with Halpern, 26 February 2006).
14 By conventional measure, the gravitational force is a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth the strength of the next strongest fundamental force, the weak interaction.
15 Rees (2003). I thank Martin Rees for his advice on the status of Dirac’s large numbers hypothesis.
16 E-mails from James Overduin, 20–2 July 2006.
17 Overduin and Plendl (2007).
18 I thank Rolf Landua of CERN for his expert help on the current state of experimental research into anti-matter.
19 See Yang (1980: 39).
20 These words, written on 27 November 1975, seem to have been special to Dirac. He wrote them on a single sheet of paper and filed them among his lecture notes: Dirac Papers 2/29/17 (FSU). The words replaced by [this happened] are ‘I have felt the mathematics lead me by the hand.’
21 The first reference to beauty in Dirac’s papers appears to be in the paper he co-wrote with Kapitza in 1933, ‘The Reflection of Electrons from Standing Light Waves’, where they refer to the beauty of the colour photography introduced by Gabriel Lippmann.
22 Green and Schwarz’s paper was received on 10 September 1984 by the academic journal Physics Letters B, which published it on 13 December.
23 For a popular account of modern string theory, see Greene (1999).
24 Dirac told his student Harish-Chandra, ‘I am not interested in proofs but only in what nature does’: Dalitz and
Peierls (1986: 156).
25 Dirac’s notes commend Witten’s ‘brilliant solutions to a number of problems in mathematical physics’, Dirac Papers, 2/14/9 (FSU).
26 Interview with Edward Witten, 8 July 2005, and e-mail, 30 August 2006.
27 E-mail from Veltman, 20 January 2008. For a sceptical assessment of string theory, see Woit (2006), especially Chapters 13–19.
Bibliography
Genealogy
The genealogy of the Dirac family is presented at http://www.dirac.ch. The website is maintained by Gisela Dirac-Wahrenburg.
References
In the text, I do not normally give a reference for Dirac’s technical papers. They are listed in full in Dalitz (1995) and in Kragh (1990).
Aaserud, F. (1990) Redirecting Science: Niels Bohr, Philanthropy, and the Rise of Nuclear Physics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Annan, N. (1992) Our Age: Portrait of a Generation, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Anon. (1935) The Frustration of Science, foreword by F. Soddy, New York: W. W. Norton.
Anon. (1993) Operation Epsilon: The Farm Hall Transcripts, Bristol, Institute of Physics Publishing.
Anon. (2001) The Cuban Missile Crisis: Selected Foreign Policy Documents from the Administration of John F. Kennedy, January 1961–November 1962, London: The Stationery Office, pp. 109–34.
Anon. (2007) ‘Autism Speaks: The United States Pays Up’, Nature, 448: 628–9.
Badash, L. (1985) Kaptiza, Rutherford and the Kremlin, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Baer, H. and Belyaev, A. (eds) (2003) Proceedings of the Dirac Centennial Symposium, London: World Scientific.
Baldwin, T. (1990) G. E. Moore, London and New York: Routledge.
Barham, J. (1977) Cambridgeshire at War, Cambridge: Bird’s Farm.
Baron-Cohen, S. (2003) The Essential Difference, New York: Basic Books.
Barrow, J. (2002) The Constants of Nature, New York: Pantheon Books.
The Strangest Man Page 73