My shelves are populated with part-read scientific biographies, and it is rare to find one that keeps me enthralled. The problem is that the author usually has to pack in stuff about the hero’s boring old relatives, and give dates and places from birth to death, as well as trying to make comprehensible some brain-torturing science. But Graham Farmelo has pulled it off – this is genuinely a beautifully written book, and one which through its coverage of the work of Dirac’s famous contemporary physicists such as Einstein, Heisenberg, Schroedinger and Bohr, ends up providing a nice synthesis of the crucial bits of twentieth-century physics in a very digestible form. Certainly a lot more more digestible than Hawking’s Brief History of Time.

Farmelo’s advantage is that Dirac, a Nobel-Prizewinning physicist from Bristol, often quoted as Britain’s answer to Einstein, is an intriguing character. Renowned for never using one word where none would suffice. Straight speaking when he actually spoke, socially unfeeling at all times, and consequently the subject of a huge number of anecdotes, Farmelo suggests that Dirac was probably autistic. In this context the oftrepeated jokes fall a bit flat but explain his absolute focus.

Dirac was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics during the 1920s. He has an equation named after him that combines quantum mechanics and relativity (usually thought of as the immiscible oil and vinegar of physics theories) to describe how an electron behaves at all speeds, even the speed of light. A version of this equation is inscribed on his memorial at Westminster Abbey, and the equation is apparently still a source of ideas for mathematicians. The equation led Dirac to predict antimatter – that’s the one where if you meet your antimatter self and shake hands you both disappear – but you really need to read the book. He rose to become Lucasian Professor of Physics at Cambridge, a post held by Newton in the 18th century, and today by Hawking.

There is plenty here for local historians to enjoy, since Dirac was a Bristolian through and through. Born in Monk Road in 1902, he lived at 6 Julius Road for a decade, and was educated at the Merchant Venturer’s School and Bristol University. He spoke with the soft Bristol accent. He might have seemed strange, but he was not half impressive. And, particularly in Bristol, his name really deserves to be known by everybody.

Robin Rees

The Strangest Man-The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius, Graham Farmelo, £22.50 (ISBN: 978-0-571222-78-0), Faber