Dirac - autistic?

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Dr. FARMELO: Yeah. Well, I have to say, I wouldn't say he was humorless. He actually did like jokes, and some of them quite - some quite racy jokes. But taken as a whole, if you look at his behavior, and I did -honestly, I did not start out the book thinking that he was autistic. I mean, but when I look back after several years of research and looked at all the evidence, then in my view, you take the definition of autism, the medical definition of autism, and you compare it to every single aspect of his behavior, then I would say the evidence is very compelling that Dirac is - or was a classic example of someone who is autistic.

FLATOW: What kind of evidence are you talking about? Give us an idea.

Dr. FARMELO: Well, you look at all the classic symptoms, so to speak: very repetitive behavior, found empathy extremely, extremely difficult, man of extremely few words. I mean, is it - Dirac is someone who - there was actually a unit called a Dirac, which was one word an hour, which was used in Cambridge.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Dr. FARMELO: Someone of extremely narrow range of interests, or at least, it certainly appeared like that in his younger years. Later on, when he was at Florida State University on the faculty there, I mean, he did loosen up, somewhat. But if you go through it systematically…

FLATOW: Yeah.

Dr. FARMELO: …it's really - I think the evidence is very compelling.

Dr. FARMELO: …he, nonetheless, had some very successful graduate students, nearly all of whom he said they were very, very bright. Dirac was a hands-off (unintelligible). He had people like Harish Chandra, the great mathematician, one of his students. Dennis Sciama, Stephen Hawking's supervisor, was supervised by Dirac. So, he did have successful students. But I don't think he'd be - most…

FLATOW: Right

Dr. FARMELO: …people's idea of a successful supervisor.

FLATOW: Well, did he talk to them mathematically? With the trouble speaking verbally to anybody, did he open up to them verbally, or did he - you know, just one who gets to the blackboard and puts the equations or explains the math to them?

Dr. FARMELO: He wouldn't open up in the same way that you or I would open up. But he did - he had the rudiments of supervision in a sense that he knew you had to give your students soluble problems. But the idea of being a support and an infuser, that was lost on Paul Dirac.

FLATOW: And put all these together, that's why you're thinking that he might have been autistic.

Dr. FARMELO: Well, yes. I mean, as I said, I looked up this whole behavior when making that speculation.

FLATOW: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. FARMELO: And it is a speculation.

FLATOW: But he never got the celebrity that Einstein did.

Dr. FARMELO: Oh, no. That's absolutely right. He didn't want it. He would actually pose as an ordinary member of the public when officials came looking for him, really. I mean, Heisenberg would actually - one of his colleagues in quantum physics would actually lie and say that he's nowhere to be seen, whereas Dirac was actually sitting behind the photographers, right?

FLATOW: Wow.

Dr. FARMELO: He just didn't want anything to do with it. You know, and part of the reason, you know, that Dirac wasn't famous is he had no great moment where a scientist is suddenly propelled into celebrity. I mean, Einstein had one in 1919. He was famous to his colleagues, but the public knew nothing about him. But then, it was arranged that there would be this great conflict between Einstein and Newton over the bending of starlight. And then overnight, Einstein became a world celebrity.

FLATOW: Right.

Margit, known as Manci, visited her brother in 1934 in Princeton from her native Hungary and, while at dinner at the Annex Restaurant (1930s–2006[12]), met the "lonely-looking man at the next table." This account came from a physicist from Korea who met and was influenced by Dirac, Y.S. Kim, who has also written "It is quite fortunate for the physics community that Manci took good care of our respected Paul A. M. Dirac. Dirac published eleven papers during the period 1939-46. ... Dirac was able to maintain his normal research productivity only because Manci was in charge of everything else."[13]

A reviewer of the 2009 biography writes: "Dirac blamed his [emotional] frailties on his father, a Swiss immigrant who bullied his wife, chivvied his children and insisted Paul spoke only French at home, even though the Diracs lived in Bristol. 'I never knew love or affection when I was a child,' Dirac once said." She also writes that "[t]he problem lay with his genes. Both father and son had autism, to differing degrees. Hence the Nobel winner's reticence, literal-mindedness, rigid patterns of behaviour and self-centredness. [Quoting the biography:] 'Dirac's traits as a person with autism were crucial to his success as a theoretical physicist: his ability to order information about mathematics and physics in a systematic way, his visual imagination, his self-centredness, his concentration and determination.'"[14]
[edit] Personality

Dirac was known among his colleagues for his precise and taciturn nature. When Niels Bohr complained that he did not know how to finish a sentence in a scientific article he was writing, Dirac replied, "I was taught at school never to start a sentence without knowing the end of it."[15] He criticized the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's interest in poetry: "The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible."[16]

Dirac himself wrote in his diary during his postgraduate years that he concentrated solely on his research, and only stopped on Sunday, when he took long strolls alone.[citation needed]

An anecdote recounted in a review of the 2009 biography tells of Werner Heisenberg and Dirac sailing on a cruise ship to a conference in Japan in August, 1929. "Both still in their twenties, and unmarried, they made an odd couple. Heisenberg was a hedonist who constantly flirted and danced with women on the ship, while Dirac—'an Edwardian geek', as [biographer] Graham Farmelo puts it—suffered agonies if forced into any kind of socialising or small talk. 'Why do you dance?' Dirac asked his companion. 'When there are nice girls, it is a pleasure,' Heisenberg replied. Dirac pondered this notion, then blurted out: 'But, Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?'"[14]

According to a story told in different versions, a friend or student visited Dirac, not knowing of his marriage. Noticing the visitor's surprise at seeing an attractive woman in the house, Dirac said, "This is... this is Wigner's sister". Margit Dirac told both George Gamow and Anton Z. Capri in the 1960s that her husband had actually said, "Allow me to present Wigner's sister, who is now my wife."[17][18]

Dirac was also noted for his personal modesty. He called the equation for the time evolution of a quantum-mechanical operator, which he was the first to write down, the "Heisenberg equation of motion". Most physicists speak of Fermi-Dirac statistics for half-integer-spin particles and Bose-Einstein statistics for integer-spin particles. While lecturing later in life, Dirac always insisted on calling the former "Fermi statistics". He referred to the latter as "Einstein statistics" for reasons, he explained, of "symmetry".[citation needed]

Once when someone, making polite conversation at dinner, commented that it was windy, Dirac left the table and went to the door, looked out, returned to the table and replied that indeed it was windy. It has been said in jest that his spoken vocabulary consisted of "Yes", "No", and "I don't know".

# Dirac's laconic nature is most well documented. Once, in the middle of a lecture, a student rose up and said to him, "Professor Dirac, I haven't understood equation no. 10". Dirac nodded and then, to the surprise of the student, simply continued writing. This happened once again. Finally, the student said, "Professor Dirac, why are you not answering my question?". To which Dirac replied "Question? Oh! I thought what you said was a statement, that you have not understood equation no.10"

# Dirac was a visiting member at the famed Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Usually there was a common telephone in the hall where the members had their offices. Whenever there was a call for Dirac, it was amusing for the other members to hear his conversation, punctuated almost exclusively by "yes" and "no". Once Dirac wanted to submit an advance copy of a talk he was going to give to a newspaper. He was concerned that the talk might be published before he delivered it. So he walked into an office where two of his colleagues, Abraham Pais (chronicler of physicists' lives and one time assistant to Einstein) and Jeremy Bernstein (another well known chronicler of physicists' lives) were having a conversation. He told them about the problem and one of them advised him to send a note along with the talk to the newspaper saying "Not to publish in any form". Dirac heard this and stood in the doorway. After an awkward silence, (and also because they were used to this behaviour) his colleagues resumed their conversation with each other. After about fifteen minutes, Dirac finally asked them, "Don't you think that the words 'in any form' in the above phrase are redundant?"

# My personal favourite Dirac anecdote concerns a sea voyage to Japan, on which he was travelling with his friend and colleague, Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg was the exact opposite of Dirac. Talkative and flamboyant, he used to the take part regularly in the weekly social events on the ship, including the dances. During these events, Dirac used to quietly sit in a corner, if he came at all that is, and watch. Once, just before a dance was going to begin, he asked Heisenberg, "Heisenberg, why do you dance?". At this typical Diracian question, all that Heisenberg could say that time was "Well, when there are pretty and nice girls, then I feel like dancing with them". Dirac fell silent. After a long time, he called Heisenberg and asked him, "How do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?"

Actually Dirac is only "more" autistic than Einsten. You don't know how Einstein behave socially before 30s. At 30s many Spectrum people could have developed some kind of social skill.