The Strangest Man - Graham Farmelo

About the author:  Graham Paul Farmelo (born 18 May 1953) is a biographer and science writer, a By-Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, U.K., and an Adjunct Professor of Physics at North Eastern University, Boston, U.S.A. He is best known for his work on science communication and as the author of The Strangest Man, a prize-winning biography of the theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, He lives in London.

Dirac was a much lauded physicist, he had an extremely difficult child hood and became extremely introverted. He was treated differently and very severely by his father.  Dirac believed he was a failure.  Rob said that the story did not go too much into physics.   Many of his lectures on atoms  being attended by 1,000 s of people. There has to be beauty in equations to attract this level of attention.  Mary could not read beyond the first hundred pages.  Two other people thought that it was an incredibly boring read. Charles a physicist and talented engineer lauded the fact that electronics came from his theories, and the greatest and most recent is the Higgs Bosun.  

Dirac was on the autistic spectrum. He did not communicate freely and retained the belief that you do not start a sentence unless you know how to finish it.  Amongst his colleagues was Einstein. Dirac was known among his colleagues for his precise and taciturn nature. His colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit of a "dirac", which was one word per hour. His achievments are feted around the world but there is no recognition within GB that reflects the significance of his theories.

The choices that Gaynor and Tom presented are:

The Street Sweeper - Elliott Pierman

The Lacuna - Barabra Kingsolver

The Fifth Witness - Michael Connelly

A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon