RE: [aspires-relationships - Our Bushfires in Oz

[Guest guest]

Thankyou e and  all those others who have thought of us

through this terrible few days of fires.

Death toll todate in has been well over 100, with many

hundreds of homes destroyed.    I’m personally very fortunate, as none of

the fires have come anywhere near my City of Ballarat.   But some very

well-known and historic spots have been devastated and certain towns just

completely wiped out.

Ron.

From:

aspires-relationships

[mailto:aspires-relationships ] On Behalf Of Usarian

& e

Sent: Monday, 9 February 2009 1:55 AM

To: aspires-relationships

Subject: Sending my sympathy

Just

wanted to send my sympathy and condolences to our Australian friends because of

the wild fires and deaths that have occurred over the past 24 hours. My

prayers are with you.

e

-----

Original Message -----

From: Newland

To: aspires-relationships

Sent: Sunday, February 08,

2009 8:39 AM

Subject:

Article~The Strangest Man

The Strangest Man

Meet Dirac – physics genius and social wreck

Ask people to name a famous early-20th century physicist and

you'll get mostly Einsteins, with maybe the odd Schrödinger or Heisenberg

thrown in. It's unlikely anyone will say Dirac, yet the Bristol-born

scientist was at least as important to the development of modern physics as the

latter two, and was arguably equal to Einstein in terms of the mindset change

that his ground-breaking and revolutionary work introduced.

Essentially the founder of quantum mechanics, Dirac was a deeply odd

character, a monosyllabic recluse who had eyes only for the beauty of

mathematics and the subatomic world that his mind-boggling equations describe.

This exhaustive biography makes an argument for Dirac's numerical brilliance

and social awkwardness being attributable to undiagnosed high-functioning

autism, but in his lifetime he was simply regarded by his peers as one of the greatest

minds ever to tackle physics.

The reasons for Dirac's lack of celebrity compared to Einstein are twofold.

On the one hand his desire to avoid the limelight was compulsive. He turned

down honours from the Queen and only accepted his Nobel Prize in person when a

colleague suggested it would garner more attention if he refused. The other

reason is that Dirac's physics is harder to grasp than Einstein's. E=mc2 is a

lot easier to fit on a T-shirt than the Dirac equation describing the behaviour

of an electron, which contains over a dozen terms, three sets of brackets and

half the Greek alphabet. That equation was a mathematically elegant way of

combining what was already known about subatomic particles with Einstein's

theory of relativity. One of the shocking results from this work, published in

1928, was that it predicted the existence of antiparticles, which transformed

physics when their existence was confirmed by the experimental observation of

cosmic rays four years later.

Born in 1902, Dirac was only in his mid-twenties when he came up with this

shining star of his career, but he'd already made his name in the world of

theoretical physics with a string of audacious but complex papers on various

aspects of the subatomic world. Prior to that, his early life was marred by an

extremely difficult upbringing at the hands of a domineering father and

suffocating mother. Graham Farmelo has had access to a huge raft of family

papers and they reveal that Dirac suffered extreme physical discomfort and

emotional manipulation, factors that no doubt contributed to his unusual mental

state.

But for all that Dirac was a loner, he was also part of an extraordinary

time in physics. During the 1920s and 1930s there was an explosion of new

thinking about the origins of the universe, the structure of atoms, events at

close to light speed, and Farmelo does a good job of conjuring up the heady

atmosphere at the academic centres of Cambridge, Göttingen in Germany and

Copenhagen, where a gaggle of young men including Schrödinger, Heisenberg,

Niels Bohr and Wolfgang i were vying for bragging rights, arguing over

theories in beer-soaked halls and winding each other up at conferences. Dirac

was a part of this scene but always apart, viewed as a brilliant but strange

fish by his more outgoing contemporaries.

There's a problem with writing a comprehensive biography of such a guarded

figure. Dirac's best physics was behind him by his early thirties, and his

career a slow decline from winning the Nobel Prize in 1933. With nothing in the

way of extracurricular interests or even discernible personality to work with,

Farmelo is left to describe Dirac's nomadic wanderings from campus to campus,

only the occasional interesting development to spark the reader's interest.

One such was his unlikely marriage to Margit Wigner, the sister of a

Hungarian colleague, in 1937. She was an overbearing and spoilt woman, but

Dirac nevertheless seemed to love her in his own distant way, even if their

relationship did become fractious as the years wore on.

The other interesting development in Dirac's life was the Second World War,

during which he worked on the British equivalent of the Manhattan Project to

develop the atomic bomb.

True to form, however, Dirac's engagement with the war effort was marginal

and he resented being sidetracked from his own sublime theories. Throughout his

whole career he showed no interest in the practical applications of his work,

and was concerned only with the underlying beauty of his abstract notions.

As his theories were built upon by the next generation of young physicists,

Dirac became increasingly isolated and reactionary. He dismissed their work as

mathematically ugly (the worst insult he could imagine), this despite the new

theories' better match with experimental results.

Dirac remained a truly strange man until his death in 1984, but his work

nevertheless deserves to be better known, something that this biography goes

some way to correct.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-strangest-man-by-graham-farmelo-1546018.html

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