The Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the. In The Strangest Man, Graham Farmelo tries to get under the skin of one Paul Dirac: The man who conjured laws of nature from pure thought. “The purest soul” is a quotation about Dirac from Niels Bohr, as is Graham Farmelo’s title. (“Dirac is the strangest man,” Bohr said, “who ever.
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Well, I have to say, I wouldn’t say he was humorless.
Forever filling in gaps with one’s own guesses as to the subject’s thoughts, actions diracc words is not helpful, it’s misleading. For me, his most precious and, unfortunately, underappreciated work is P. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.
Highly recommended for any person who finds excitement in biographies of scientists. It always seems interesting to read about the scientist behind major discoveries.
Besides learning about his legacy in quantum mechanics and electrodynamics and the contributions of so many amazing scientists of this golden era, what really kept my motivation throughout this biography so vividly was reading about the personality of this genius.
I mean, Strajgest had one in He believed that a different sort of dynamics was needed, one that would get rid of the problems of infinities.
Physicist Paul Dirac Is ‘The Strangest Man’
This timing then placed Dirac in a position to develop one of the most influential branches of physics ever: He is English, of course, and the idea where I could compare myself to Dirac would be say that he came from a modest home—and he was rirac only of the quantum physicists like that incidentally, no professors in the family, right; from a pretty ordinary upbringing, right.
This flaw really dam The number of “if”s, “may”s, “probably”s and “likely”s in this book is alarming; the author speculates with a frequency that in the end actually less than half way through, for me undermines this detailed, comprehensive biography of one of the most influential and under-appreciated humans of all history.
The author has obviously spent a lot of time researching the man, and has talked to seemingly all the major characters who were still alive during the time of his research. I mean, Dirac actually – well, he wouldn’t go stranget Switzerland because he hated his Swiss father so much. Return to Book Page.
As you say, he throws down what he’s doing. His textbook on Quantum Mechanics remains a rigorously clear explanation of the fundamental idea of quantum theory.
The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac by Graham Farmelo – review
Read more Read less. Any kind of grammatical error and Dirac would be denied his next wish. Finally there is the story of a man, his scientific achievements, his distant personality, his upbringing in a dysfunctional family and his transition that allows him to establish a family of his own.
And it is a speculation. Web sites related to this episode include www.
And he’s – and a rather shrinking violet of a mother, Flo. April 30, at 1: Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Then there is Dirac the scientist. Nowadays, it is quite uncontroversial that experimentalists often work to verify the predictions of particle theorists, yet there are other areas where new ideas are objected to on the grounds that they diverge from the way science has been done in the past.
This is a great shame because Dirac and the reading public deserve better. In addition to being one of the smartest people ever, Dirac was a Grade A Weirdo.
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo
I te they rate him as [brain], there’s no question about that, [but] whereas it would be sensible and courteous to offer him a position after he retired, basically he was cast out after his Lucasian chair ended; and then it was American universities who were trying to get him there.
Harrison did an excellent job narrating this long book. So you could argue, as I say at the end of the book, you could argue, that Dirac’s obdurate, [his] stubborn resistance to the modern quantum electrodynamics was validated by the fact that there was stranngest a theory without strangsst infinities lying ahead.
Today, positrons are routinely generated in mass produced equipment all over the world. So he had that kind of mystical approach to theoretical physics.
I see one reviewer found a couple of historical inaccuracies.