Paul A. M. Dirac, Interview by Friedrich Hund (1982) [video]

youtube.com

123 points by mdp2021 2 months ago


dctoedt - 2 months ago

Some great stories about Dirac's "unusual" personality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dirac#Personality

One of my favorite theologians, physicist-turned-Anglican-priest Dr. John Polkinghorne FRS, did his Ph.D in Dirac's group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Polkinghorne

mdp2021 - 2 months ago

Please note that there also exist video lectures from Dirac on YT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GwctBldBvU

dkfmn - 2 months ago

Oppenheimer once wrote a letter of recommendation for Richard Feynman and called him: "a second Dirac, only this time human."

cubefox - 2 months ago

I'm not a physicist, but it's very pleasant listening to a conversation between two old intellectuals.

pm3003 - 2 months ago

I read in Friedrich Hund's Wikipedia biography that while he was in Jena in after WWII in East Germany, the head of the Thuringen state government awarded him in 1949.... a voucher for a pair of shoes (a copy of the letter is on Wikipedia) as recognition of his academic merits.

He ended up emigrating to the West in 1951, and thus avoided the bloody 1953 Soviet repression of unions demands in Jena. Question to Germans: Was the shoe voucher a more or less hidden message, or just typical postwar East German socialism?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Brief_Eg...

ndsipa_pomu - 2 months ago

Had to listen to see if Dirac had a Bristolian accent, but unfortunately not.

DFHippie - 2 months ago

Paul Dirac looks and sounds a lot like my father's father, though he delivers his words faster and with more emotion. I almost never heard my grandfather speak.

koolala - 2 months ago

Was the Moon time discrepancy to atomic clocks ever proven or disproven?

WhitneyLand - 2 months ago

Everyone is waiting for a breakthrough to merge quantum mechanics and general relativity. What kind of intellectual bombshell will that take? What kind of mind will it take to have such an insight?

Amazing to think there was a similar vibe in the 1920’s around trying to merge quantum mechanics and special relativity. They seemed incompatible at a basic level, yet this cool guy on the autism spectrum came along and said here ya go fixed that for you.

curtisszmania - 2 months ago

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blahhh2525 - 2 months ago

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