Awards
Costa Biography Award
2009 Shortlist
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius by Graham Farmelo
Publisher: Faber and Faber
The greatest British physicist since Newton, Paul Dirac was a pioneer of quantum mechanics and was regarded as an equal by Albert Einstein. He predicted, purely from what he saw in his equations, the existence of antimatter. One of the youngest theoreticians to win the Nobel Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely literal-minded and almost completely unable to communicate or empathise. Based on a previously undiscovered archive of family papers in Florida, Graham Farmelo celebrates Dirac's massive scientific achievement while drawing a compassionate portrait of his life and the people around him.
Graham Farmelo is Senior Research Fellow at the Science Museum, London, and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Northeastern University, Boston, USA. Formerly a theoretical physicist, he is now an international consultant in science communication. He edited the best-selling It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science in 2002. He lives in London.
Judges: "Moving, funny, sad and intensely readable, this is a fascinating insight into the psychology of genius."
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