Yang, C. N. 1, 2, 3, 4n25
Yeats, W. B.: The Living Beauty 1
Yeshiva University, New York 1
Yosemite National Park 1
Zimmerman, Erika 1, 2n35
Zurich 1, 2
Zweig, George 1
Acknowledgements
Art is I, science is we.
CLAUDE BERNARD (1865) ‘Introduction’ to L’Étude de la médecine experimental
Claude Bernard was right. Biographies of scientists, too, are ‘we’, not ‘I’, in the sense that none could be written satisfactorily without a good deal of help. So I’d like to begin by acknowledging the huge contribution of the scientists, historians, archivists and writers who have preserved memories and other information about Paul Dirac. My gratitude extends to Dirac himself, who evidently took care to preserve documents about many crucial events in life, right down to the row about his Cambridge parking permit.
But let me be more specific. First I should like to thank Dirac’s closest family. His daughter Monica has been unfailingly helpful, welcoming my enquiries and going out of her way to make available family documents to me. Her friend John Amy has been immensely accommodating to me throughout the project, and I am duly grateful to him. No less kind than Monica was Dirac’s other daughter, Mary, who died in Tallahassee on 20 January 2007. Her guardian, Marshall Knight, has been extremely generous and obliging to me, especially during my visits to Florida.
Other family members who have given generously of their time in helping me: Gisela and Christian Dirac, Leo Dirac, Vicky Dirac, Barbara Dirac-Svejstrup, Christine Teszler, Pat Wigner, Charles and Mary Upton, Peter Lantos and Erika Zimmermann. Past family members who provided valuable testimonies are Tony Colleraine and Peter Tilley. Gisela Dirac, the family genealogist, has been indefatigable in helping to clarify the French and Swiss provenance of the Dirac family.
Four institutions to which I owe special gratitude are St John’s College, Cambridge, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Florida State University in Tallahassee and Bristol University.
St John’s invited me to stay in the college several times, enabling me to experience day-to-day life there, to use its superb facilities and to talk at length with several of Dirac’s former colleagues and acquaintances. I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of the college for this hospitality and for making available the facilities of the college to me, notably the library. For enlightening conversations, I thank the late John Crooke, Duncan Dormor, Clifford Evans, Jane Heale, John Leake, Nick Manton, George Watson and Sir Maurice Wilkes. I have received a huge amount of support from the college library, especially from Mark Nicholls, Malcolm Underwood and the special collections librarian Jonathan Harrison, whose industry has enormously benefited the book. The university library has been most helpful, and I would like to thank Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Jackie Cox for taking so much trouble to answer my queries. Also in Cambridge, I should like to thank Yorrick and Helaine Blumenfeld, Richard Eden, Peter Landshoff, Sir Brian Pippard, the Reverend Sir John Polkinghorne and Lord (Martin) Rees.
At the Institute for Advanced Study, I was fortunate enough to spend four productive and very happy summers researching the book and writing it. I benefited considerably from conversations there with Yve-Alain Bois, Freeman Dyson, Peter Goddard, Juan Maldacena, Nathan Seiberg, Morton White and Edward Witten. The library facilities at the institute are peerless, and I should like to thank all the staff there who were unstinting in their support: Karen Downing, Momota Ganguli, Gabriella Hoskin, Erica Mosner, Marcia Tucker, Kirstie Venanzi and Judy Wilson-Smith. Among the other colleagues who made my stays there so rewarding: Linda Arntzenius, Alan Cheng, Karen Cuozzo, Jennifer Hansen, Beatrice Jessen, Kevin Kelly, Camille Merger, Nadine Thompson, Sharon Tozzi-Goff and Sarah Zantua. Also in Princeton, I should like to thank Gillett Griffin, Lily Harish-Chandra, Louise Morse (mère et soeur) and Terri Nelson.
I should like to give my special thanks to Peter Goddard, formerly Master of St John’s, now Director of the Institute for Advanced Study. No one has been more supportive of the project or shown more interest in its progress. I owe him an enormous debt.
At Florida State University, I have benefited from the excellent library facilities and from invaluable help from the staff responsible for the Dirac archive. Sharon Schwerzel, Head of the Paul A. M. Dirac Science Library, could not have been more helpful to me – her understanding of the challenges faced by a biographer working thousands of miles from the primary archive has been hugely beneficial. It has also been a delight to work with Chuck McCann, Paul Vermeron, with Lucy Patrick and all the librarians in Special Collections: Burt Altman, Garnett Avant, Denise Gianniano, Ginger Harkey, Alice Motes, Michael Matos and Chad Underwood. On the past and present faculty of the university, I should like to thank Howie Baer, Steve Edwards, the late Leopold Halpern, Kurt Hofer, Harry Kroto, Robley Light, Bill Moulton and Hans Plendl. Through colleagues at Florida State, I also met many other people in Tallahassee who shared their memories of Dirac with me: Ken van Assenderp, Pamela Houmère, Peggy Lannutti, Jeanne Light, Pat Ritchie, Rae Roeder and Hansell Watt.
At Bristol University, I have been supported by Debra Avent- Gibson, Sir Michael Berry, Chris Harries, Michael Richardson, Margaret and Vincent Smith and Leslie Warne. Many others in Bristol have also done much to shed light on Dirac’s early life, especially Karen and Chris Benson, Dick Clements, Alan Elkan, Andrew Lang, John Penny and John Steeds. I was fortunate to be introduced to Don Carleton, a local historian, who has done an inordinate amount of work to illuminate the history of Bristol in the early twentieth century.
I should like to thank the following institutions for granting permission to quote from their archives: American Philosophical Society; Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; University of Bristol Library; Bristol Record Office; British Broadcasting Corporation; Masters and Fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge; The Syndics of Cambridge University Library; Council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings; Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; Master, Fellows and scholars of St John’s College Cambridge; Archives for the History of Quantum Physics, College Park, MD, USA; Archives for the Society of Merchant Venturers, held at the Bristol Records Office, UK; Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge; Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen; Princeton University Library; Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851; International Solvay Institutes, Brussels; Special Collections at the University of Sussex; Archives at the United Theological College, Bangalore, India.
During my research, many friends and colleagues at archives and other institutions have given me valuable support. At the California Institute of Technology archives: Shelley Erwin and Bonnie Ludt. At the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics, Maryland: Melanie Brown, Julie Gass, Spencer Weart and Stephanie Jankowski. At CERN, Geneva: John Ellis, Rolf Landua, Esthel Laperrière. In the Archives Centre: Anita Hollier. At Christ’s College, Cambridge: Candace Guite. At the archive of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851: Angela Kenny and Valerie Phillips. At the Archives in the College of Aeronautics, Cranfield University: John Harrington. At the Archives of Imperial College, London: Anne Barrett. At Lambeth Palace Library, London: Naomi Ward. At the Royal Society, London: Martin Carr and Ross MacFarlane. At the Max Planck Institute, Munich: Helmut Rechenberg. At the Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen: Finn Asserud and Felicity Pors. At the University of Madison, Wisconsin: Vernon Barger, Tom Butler, Kerry Kresse, Ron Larson, David Null and Bill Robbins. At Firestone Library, Princeton University: AnnaLee Pauls and Meg Sherry Rich. At the Solvay archive in the Free University of Brussels: Carole Masson, Dominique Bogaerts and Isabelle Juif. At the Science Museum, London: Heather Mayfield, Doug Millard, Andrew Nahum, Matthew Pudney and Jon Tucker. It is a special pleasure to thank past and present staff at the Science Museum Library: Ian Carter, Allison Pollard, Prabha Shah, Valerie Scott, Robert Sharp, Joanna Shrimpton, Jim Singleton, Mandy Taylor, Peter Tajasque, John Underwood and Nick Wyatt. Thanks also to Ben Whe
lehan at Imperial College Library. At the Tata Institute in Bombay: Indira Chowdhury. At the National Media Museum, York: Colin Harding and John Trenouth. At Special Collections, University of Sussex: Dorothy Sheridan and Karen Watson. For their help with determining the detailed weather conditions in towns and cities in the UK and USA, it is a pleasure to thank Steve Jebson at the Met Office and Melissa Griffin at Florida State University.
Others who have been extremely helpful in responding to my enquiries: Sir Michael Atiyah, Tom Baldwin, John Barnes, Herman Batelaan, Steve Batterson, John Bendall, Giovanna Blackett, Margaret Booth (née Hartree), Gustav Born, Olaf Breidbach, Andrew Brown, Nicholas Capaldi, David Cassidy, Brian Cathcart, Martin Clark, Paul Clark, Chris Cockcroft, Thea Cockcroft, Flurin Condrau, Beverley Cook, Peter Cooper, Tam Dalyell, Dick Dalitz, Olivier Darrigol, Richard Davies, Stanley Deser, David Edgerton, John Ellis, Joyce Farmelo, Michael Frayn, Igor Gamow, Joshua Goldman, Jeffrey Goldstone, Jeremy Gray, Karl Hall, Richard Hartree, Peter Harvey, Steve Henderson, Chris Hicks, John Holt, Jeff Hughes, Lane Hughston, Bob Jaffe, Edgar Jenkins, Allan Jones, Bob Ketchum, Anne Kox, Charles Kuper, Peter Lamarque, Willis Lamb, Dominique Lambert, Ellen and Leon Lederman, Sabine Lee, John Maddox, Philip Mannheim, Robin Marshall, Dennis McCormick, Arthur I. Miller, Andrew Nahum, Michael Noakes, Mary Jo Nye, Susan Oakes, James Overduin, Bob Parkinson, John Partington, Sir Roger Penrose, Trevor Powell, Roger Philips, Chris Redmond, Tony Scarr, Robert Schulmann, Bernard Shultz, Simon Singh, John Skorupski, Ulrica Söderlind, Alistair Sponsel, Henry King Stanford, Simon Stevens, George Sudashan, Colleen Taylor-Sen, Laura Thorne, Claire Tomalin, Martin Veltman, Andrew Warwick, John Watson, Russell Webb, Nina Wedderburn, John Wheeler, the late David Whitehead, Oliver Whitehead, Frank Wilczek, Michael Worboys, Nigel Wrench, Sir Denys Wilkinson and Abe Yoffe. Special thanks to Alexei Kojevnikov, who has been unstinting in the guidance and help he has given to me concerning the development of Russian physics in the past century.
For their help with primary research, my sincere thanks to Anna Cain, Martin Clark, Ruth Horry, Anna Menzies, James Jackson, Joshua Goldman, Katie Kiekhaefer, Tadas Krupovnickas and Jimmy Sebastian.
For technical support, thanks to: Paul Chen at Biblioscape (the marvellous bibliographic software) and Ian Hart.
For translating documents, I am indebted to Paul Clark, Gisela Dirac, Karl Grandin, Asger Høeg, Anna Menzies, Dora Bobory and Eszter Molnar-Mills.
For reading parts of the manuscript and for their constructive comments, thanks to: Simon Baron-Cohen, Paul Clark, Olivier Darrigol, Uta Frith, Freeman Dyson, Roger Highfield, Kurt Hofer, Bob Jaffe, Ramamurti Rajaraman, Martin Rees and Jon Tucker. And for reading the entire manuscript and for dozens of helpful comments, thanks to: Don Carleton, Stanley Deser, Alexei Kojevnikov, Peter Rowlands, Chuck Schwager, Marty Schwager and David Ucko. I am especially grateful to my friends David Johnson and David Sumner for reading several drafts of the book, each time providing extremely insightful and constructive feedback.
Finally, I should like to acknowledge the huge contribution of my publisher, Faber and Faber, to the book. Kate Ward supervised the production of the book with great attention to detail, and Kate Murray-Brown read the book with a keen and sensitive eye on content and style and provided many valuable suggestions and comments. Liz O’Donnell has been a dream of an editor – meticulous, sensitive, questioning and collegiate. I am indebted most of all to Neil Belton, who has supported the project from its inception, given me no end of wise advice and kept the bar high.
The concept of ‘we’ extends only so far: I take responsibility for any remaining inaccuracies in the book and for its portrayal of Paul Dirac’s work and personality. In that sense, the book is ‘I’.
Graham Farmelo
June 2008
Author biography
Graham Farmelo is Senior Research Fellow at the Science Museum, London, and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. Formerly a theoretical physicist, he is now an international consultant in science communication. He edited the bestselling It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science in 2002. He lives in London.
By the Same Author
IT MUST BE BEAUTIFUL: GREAT EQUATIONS OF MODERN SCIENCE (editor)
Copyright
First published in 2009
by Faber and Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House 74–77 Great Russell Street London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2009
All rights reserved
© Graham Farmelo, 2009
The right of Graham Farmelo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
ISBN 978—0—571—25007—3 [epub edition]
The Strangest Man Page 81