Paul Dirac spoke so rarely that Cambridge colleagues named a unit after him
At Cambridge, a 'dirac' meant one word per hour, a joke about the quietest man in physics. Paul Dirac grew up in a Bristol home where his father allowed only French at the table, so the boy often said nothing. In 1928 his equation fused relativity with quantum mechanics and predicted antimatter.
Dirac was born in Bristol on 8 August 1902. His father, a Swiss-born French teacher, was strict and domineering; his mother, a librarian from a Cornish Methodist family, had been named after Florence Nightingale. At Bishop Road Primary one of his classmates was Archibald Leach, the future Cary Grant. His secondary school stressed practical crafts such as metalwork and shoemaking instead of Latin and Greek, which he later appreciated.
He trained first as an electrical engineer, graduating in 1921 with first-class honours into a slump that offered no engineering jobs. Bristol let him take a free mathematics degree, skipping the first year, and a teacher named Peter Fraser drew him toward projective geometry. A £140 government grant added to a £70 St John's scholarship finally paid for Cambridge, where under Ralph Fowler he finished, in June 1926, the first doctoral thesis on quantum mechanics submitted anywhere.
Two years later came the Dirac equation, and his 1930 textbook The Principles of Quantum Mechanics became a standard. He helped found quantum field theory, coined the term quantum electrodynamics, and split the physics Nobel of 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger. He held the Lucasian chair at Cambridge from 1932 to 1969. Oddly modest, he credited Heisenberg with an equation he had written first and insisted on saying Fermi statistics rather than Fermi–Dirac.
Bohr called him the strangest visitor his institute ever had. Sailing to Japan with Heisenberg in 1929, Dirac asked why he danced and then how he could know in advance that his partners would be nice. Meeting the young Richard Feynman, he announced he had an equation and asked if Feynman had one. In 1937 he married Margit Wigner, sister of physicist Eugene Wigner, and raised her two children as his own. A line on mathematical beauty that he chalked at Moscow State University in 1956 has never been wiped off. He died in 1984, having taught at Florida State since 1970.
Source: Paul Dirac
