A genius like no other

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, mathematicians

Here it is, the Dirac Equation for the electron, in the form it appears on his tombstone. The number of people who actually understand this equation is about equal to the number of symbols it contains, and may be fewer. The only thing I understand about it is that it is laid the foundation for the "Standard Model" of particle physics.

I've just finished reading the definitive biography The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo. It is a largeish book, 438 pages plus 54 pages of endnotes and a great many bibliographic entries. The subject is worthy of the attention. As the author states in his final chapter, "Great thinkers are always posthumously productive." The Standard Model, string theory and antimatter are three of Dirac's legacies that continue as fruitful realms of endeavor, keeping a large number of scientists employed, many of them running the most expensive machines in the world.

The author points out several times that Dirac was always guided, rightly or wrongly, by mathematical beauty. A theory had to be beautiful for him to deem it worthy of being, possibly, true. This led to his disdain for renormalization, the technique that allows physicists to do electrodynamic calculations without being stumped by the theoretically infinite self-energy of the electron and other fermions. He thought it Ugly with a capital U. This quest for beauty led to the work that gained him a Nobel Prize at a nearly unheard-of young age: he received the Prize at age 31, for work he'd done just five years previously (the only Nobelist I've met, Charles Pedersen, was 83 when he received his Prize, for work done a few years prior to his 1969 retirement).

A characteristic of Paul Dirac's nature was a very direct way of speaking. While this led to nearly uniform abruptness of personal discourse—and lots of seeming rudeness—he became a highly sought-after public speaker, for he could make the concepts of mathematical physics and quantum mechanics clear to nearly any audience, giving them a feeling they got the gist of it, even though the math was far beyond their grasp. This is a rare gift. In the penultimate chapter, the author speculates that Dirac was "high functioning autistic", perhaps with Asperger's Syndrome. I know a couple of such people, and it is possible but by no means certain.

It is also possible that he, an exquisitely sensitive person, was stomped into deep hiding within a defensive shell by an absolute boor of a father. I know something of a life lived in secret, of building a shell to protect myself, being the only bright kid in a series of schools full of dolts. Fortunately, I had parents who were much warmer and involved than what is reported for Dirac. Then again, I am no genius.

Dirac was lucky to find a soul mate in Eugene Wigner's sister Manci. Paul and Manci were so different from one another that they could never compete, yet they were equally sensitive, and she became the unique one to draw him out of his shell…at times.

Dirac lived 4/5 of the Twentieth Century, from 1902 to 1984, from the ragged end of the horse-and-buggy era to ten years after we quit going to the moon, but were using town-sized machines to probe particles that endure only long enough to move a tenth of the diameter of a proton. In the quarter century since his death, how much farther have we gone? There is some chance that the latest big machine, the LHC, will begin to twang the "strings" that may underlie the structure of everything. Such a string is a million times smaller than the proton. My mind boggles.

Of course, my mind hit its boggle point about forty years ago when I hit my mathematical limit as a Junior Physics major, and switched to Geology. I have read Dick Feyman's Lectures, but I can't get very far with Dirac's The Principles of Quantum Mechanics. We mere mortals are glad for the demigods who can make math work because of its beauty.