Paul Dirac

By Louisa Gilder
The New York Times, September 13, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

The Strangest Man
The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
By Graham Farmelo
Basic Books, 539 pages

This biography is a wonderfully written and thoughtful meditation on human achievement and limitations. Here we find a man with an almost miraculous apprehension of the structure of the physical world, coupled with gentle incomprehension of the messier world of other people. Dirac is the main character of a thousand humorous tales told among physicists for his monosyllabic approach to conversation and his innocent, relentless application of logic to everything.

At Cambridge University in 1930, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar took a class in quantum mechanics from the 28-year-old Paul Dirac. Dirac's class — which Chandrasekhar took in its entirety four times, even though Dirac taught it by repeating material from his recently published textbook word for word — was "just like a piece of music you want to hear over and over again."

His work was as sui generis as his social skills. "The great papers of the other quantum pioneers were more ragged, less perfectly formed than Dirac's," explained Freeman Dyson, who took Dirac's course as a precocious 19-year-old. Dirac's discoveries "were like exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky, one after another. He seemed to be able to conjure laws of nature from pure thought."

Graham Farmelo gives us the texture of Dirac's life, much of it spent outdoors. We follow Dirac from his pinched and chilly childhood in Bristol, through his discovery while visiting the Bohrs in Copenhagen of what a happy family was like, his fiercely loyal friendship with Werner Heisenberg, his joyful beach honeymoon, his careful fatherhood, to his death in Florida in 1984. Farmelo presents the technical matter clearly and efficiently.

In a prologue, Farmelo describes a visit to the elderly Dirac paid by his biologist colleague Kurt Hofer. Through the eyes of Hofer, we see Dirac suddenly break out of monosyllables to talk for two hours with increasing vehemence about his monstrous father. The conflict between this prologue and the seemingly warm family life that emerges in the first chapter casts a tension over the rest of the book very similar to that felt when reading a mystery. And as in a mystery, the penultimate chapter sheds new light. There Farmelo explores the possibility that Dirac was autistic. Such complexities make for a most satisfying and memorable biography.

Wolfgang Pauli

By Georgina Ferry
The Times Literary Supplement, September 2, 2009

Edited by Andy Ross

Deciphering The Cosmic Number
The strange friendship of Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung
By Arthur I. Miller
Norton, 336 pages (2009)

Soon after he arrived to take up a new post in Zurich in the early 1930s, exhausted and emerging from divorce and a breakdown, the physicist Wolfgang Pauli took the obvious course: he checked himself into the clinic of the local analytical psychologist Carl Jung for a course of therapy. Over the following twenty-five years, the two men worked together, not just on Pauli's emotional problems but on a quest to unify the worlds of science and human psychology. Arthur I. Miller is not the first to mine their extensive correspondence for insights into both men, but his accessible account should bring this odd couple to a wider readership.

Pauli was a leading member of the group of theoretical physicists, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, who transformed our understanding of the way matter behaves at the subatomic level. Apart from his own discovery of the exclusion principle, which underlies our understanding of electricity and magnetism and for which he won a Nobel Prize in 1945, Pauli received the grudging admiration of his colleagues for acting as their most trenchant critic. Yet even at the height of his success he was not a happy man.

Jung attributed Pauli's fragile state to his over-reliance on rational thought at the expense of feeling. He prescribed Pauli a course of dream analysis, and subsequently used many of Pauli's dreams as examples in his publications. Pauli wholeheartedly accepted the more controversial aspects of Jung's theoretical framework, which struck a chord with his own long-standing interest in the mystical significance of particular numbers.

While Pauli never accepted the totality of Jung's beliefs about synchronicity, in 1952 they published a book together. Pauli's contribution was an essay on the role of archetypes in Kepler's theories in which he argued the need for an irrational element in scientific creativity.

Miller seems little interested in the relationship between Pauli and his parents. Pauli's mother poisoned herself when his father left her for another woman, but Pauli's psychological problems clearly date from before this traumatic event. My sympathies lie with Pauli's loving second wife Franca, who did at least as much as Jung to make him a more civilized member of society.
 

Beyond the Atom: The Philosophical Thought of Wolfgang Pauli
By K. V. Laurikainen
Springer-Verlag, 234 pages (1988)

AR  I read Dirac's textbook on quantum mechanics and found it strangely insightful. He really was an odd bird, and Asperger's bordering on autistic is surely a correct diagnosis. Yet his equation for the electron was amazing, brilliant, and his creation of QED was well good enough to merit his sitting in Newton's chair at Cambridge.

As for Pauli and Jung, I suspect that Miller mined the earlier book by Laurikainen that I helped Springer editor Professor Beiglböck to edit while I was at Springer-Verlag. That book contained what were then fresh details about Pauli's correspondence with Jung. I found Pauli a rather unsympathetic character, I must say, and Miller's revelations about his sex life (which Laurikainen was too discreet to discuss) may help to explain why.