The Strangest Man

Graham Farmelo

The Strangest Man is Graham Farmelo’s Costa Biography Award-winning biography of Paul Dirac, the greatest British physicist since Isaac Newton – and one of the strangest geniuses of the twentieth century.

12 in stock

£14.99
Format
Paperback
ISBN
9780571222865
Date Published
24.12.2009
Delivery
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Summary

‘A monumental achievement – one of the great scientific biographies.’ Michael Frayn

The Strangest Man is the Costa Biography Award-winning account of Paul Dirac, the famous physicist sometimes called the British Einstein. He was one of the leading pioneers of the greatest revolution in twentieth-century science: quantum mechanics. The youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and legendarily unable to communicate or empathize. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards home contained only remarks about the weather.

Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac’s massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and work. Farmelo shows a man who, while hopelessly socially inept, could manage to love and sustain close friendship.

The Strangest Man is an extraordinary and moving human story, as well as a study of one of the most exciting times in scientific history.

‘A wonderful book . . . Moving, sometimes comic, sometimes infinitely sad, and goes to the roots of what we mean by truth in science.’ Lord Waldegrave, Daily Telegraph

GrahamFarmelo

Graham Farmelo is a Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, and an Affiliate Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. He edited the best-selling It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science in 2002. His biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, won the 2009 Costa Biography Award and the 2010 Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize.

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