She was visiting her brother at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where Dirac had just arrived. Her name was Margit Wigner, the sister of a Hungarian physicist and recently divorced mother of two. Then one day, something remarkable entered Dirac’s life.

Dirac found Heisenberg’s conduct perplexing, asking him, “Why do you dance?” Heisenberg replied, “When there are nice girls, it is always a pleasure to dance.” Dirac pondered this for some minutes before responding, “But Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?” The gregarious Heisenberg made the most of the trip’s opportunities for fraternization with the opposite sex, dancing with the flapper girls. Once, Farmelo recounts, Dirac found himself on a two-week cruise from California to Japan with the eminent physicist Werner Heisenberg. Some of his colleagues suspected that he might be utterly devoid of such feelings. His father ruthlessly punished him for every error in speech, and the young Dirac adopted the strategy of saying as little as possible.ĭirac was socially awkward and showed no interest in the opposite sex. He attributes this in part to Dirac’s tyrannical upbringing. Getting him to utter even a word could prove nearly impossible, leading his mischievous colleagues to introduce a new unit of measure for the rate of human speech, the Dirac, which amounted to one word per hour.ĭirac was the kind of man who would “never utter a word when no word would do.” Farmelo describes him as a human being completely absorbed in his work, with absolutely no interest in other people or their feelings, and utterly devoid of empathy. As detailed in Graham Farmelo’s wonderful biography, The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, on which I rely heavily in this article, Dirac was an incredibly taciturn individual. In 1933 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, the youngest theoretical physicist ever to do so.Īt the time Dirac received the Nobel Prize, he was leading a remarkably drab and, to most eyes, unappealing existence. Dirac did more than any other scientist to reconcile Einstein’s general theory of relativity to quantum mechanics. Shortly thereafter he produced one of physics’ most famous theories, the Dirac equation, which correctly predicted the existence of antimatter. He studied at Cambridge, where he wrote the first-ever dissertation on quantum mechanics. Born in Bristol, England, in 1902, Paul Dirac was, after Einstein, the second most important theoretical physicist of the 20th century.

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