1 - Paul Dirac: aspects of his life and work

Summary

‘Of all physicists, Dirac has the purest soul’.

Niels Bohr

In the year 1902, the literary world witnessed the death of Zola, the birth of John Steinbeck, and the first publications of The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Immoralist, Three Sisters, and The Varieties of Religious Experience. Monet painted Waterloo Bridge, and Elgar composed Pomp and Circumstance, Caruso made his first phonograph recording and the Irish Channel was crossed for the first time by balloon. In the world of science, Heaviside postulated the Heaviside layer, Rutherford and Soddy published their transformation theory of radioactive elements, Einstein started working as a clerk in the patent office in Berne, and, on August 8, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born in Bristol, one of the children of Charles Dirac (1866-1936), a native of Monthey in the Swiss canton of Valais, and Florence Holten (1878-1941), daughter of a British sea captain. There was also a brother two years older, Reginald, whose life ended in suicide, in 1924, and Beatrice, a sister four years younger. About his father Dirac has recalled:

My father made the rule that I should only talk to him in French. He thought it would be good for me to learn French in that way. Since I found that I couldn't express myself in French, it was better for me to stay silent than to talk in English. So I became very silent at that time – that started very early.