“The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius”

Paul Dirac, sometimes called the British Einstein, was the greatest English theoretician since Newton – and one of the strangest geniuses in the entire history of science.

When Dirac won the Nobel Prize in 1933, partly for his astonishing prediction of antimatter, he was the youngest theoretician ever to win it. But his private life was full of complexity. An unemotional, literal-minded man of very few words – perhaps autistic – Dirac was also a loving family man and a passionately loyal friend. In public, he seemed interested only in science, but in private he had wide-ranging interests, from Beethoven and Rembrandt to Mickey Mouse and Cher. Graham Farmelo brings alive the dramatic human story of Dirac´s life as well as his groundbreaking contributions to science, including his achievement of co-discovering quantum mechanics, the most revolutionary theory of the past century of science.