PURE GENIUS
This review of a new biography of theoretical physicist Paul Dirac by the Economist caught my attention, primarily by this line:
"He was quite probably the best British theoretical physicist since Isaac Newton."
And it gets better from there*:
"GENIUS is said to have two forms. There are ordinary geniuses, whose
achievements one can imagine others might have emulated, so long as
they worked extremely hard and had a dollop of luck.
Then there are
extraordinary geniuses (Mark Kac, a mathematician, called them
“magicians”) whose insights are so astonishing and run so counter to
received wisdom that it is hard to imagine anyone else devising them.
Einstein was one such genius. Paul Dirac, whose equations predicted the existence of antimatter and who died in 1984, was another."
Paul Dirac won the Physics Nobel prize in 1933 for discovering antimatter.
Which of course gave us the warp drive in Star Trek in 1966. This biography goes on my reading list for February.
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