Often called “the theorist’s theorist,” Paul Dirac was one of science’s archetypal loners, shy and taciturn, apparently devoid of empathy. Late in his life, when physicists cold-called him to ask if he would care to chat about some idea that had appeared in his papers, he would cut them off firmly, saying “I think people should work on their own ideas,” before putting the phone down.
Dirac is most famous for contributions to the development of quantum mechanics, begun by Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger in 1925, when Dirac was 23. Among the early papers on the theory, Dirac’s stand out, as Freeman Dyson has pointed out: “His great discoveries were like exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky, one after another.” 1 Although Dirac was widely admired as a scientific magician, many physicists—especially ones in Berlin and in Göttingen, Germany, where many of the foundational papers on...
