Indeed, quite possibly the intenser focus and logic associated with them was integral to the evolution of his talent.

The fact that Dirac was an unusually high functioning individual even with these characteristics does not diminish their relevance. The baubles and honours tend to arrive just when the creative fires are damping down! The speculation about Dirac's psychology and possible autism at the end of the book rounded off a fascinating portrait - it is good that Farmelo did not duck the issue. Indeed, the later biography tends to run into a series of academic meetings or family history which is only of interest to the curious. Later in his career, when the creative fires were dissipating, Dirac (and the same goes for Einstein and others) usually found themselves at variance with the cutting edge scientists of the new generation. It's interesting to note how even extreme individualists like Dirac could only develop their ideas through interaction (either personal or through published material) with their peers. Farmelo's treatment of this succeeded brilliantly. There is the additional element in science of discovering how the individual fitted in to what has become very much a collective enterprise. I am always interested in the early biography of creative people, showing how they developed and kindled their creative interests. For the most part the author does a good job of tracing the development of quantum physics, the math and Dirac's place within it, without giving the impression of talking down to the layman. Unusually for a scientific book, I couldn't put it down! It covers the purely biographical aspects without skipping the harder conceptual material of the physics.

Farmelo certainly picked a hard nut to crack in writing about Dirac for a lay audience, in terms both of Dirac personally and of the complexity of his work.

The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo