And in my misspent youth, I attempted to be a theoretical physicist. Dirac is sometimes called the theoretician's theoretician. FARMELO: Well, that's part of the reason. GRAHAM FARMELO (Senior Research Fellow, Science Museum in London Author): Oh, it's a great pleasure to be here.įLATOW: Tell us why you chose such a, you know, a person that no one knows about? Is it because no one knows about him?ĭr. He joins us from the studios of WBGO in Newark.ĭr. Graham Farmelo, the author of "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom." He's adjunct professor of physics at Northeastern University, senior research fellow at the Science Museum in London.
My next guest has poured over the personal papers and archives of Paul Dirac and stitched them together into a great biography. The reason? Well, it probably has a lot to do with Dirac himself, by most accounts, a strange man.
His work figuring out the mathematical equations that describe the universe is right up there with the work of Einstein in terms of its importance and elegance.Īsk someone on the street if they've ever heard of Paul Dirac, and the answer probably is, no. And at the time, he was the youngest person ever to receive that honor.
At age 31 in 1933, Paul Dirac won the Nobel Prize. Up next, the strangest physicist you probably never heard of.
0 kommentar(er)
