[HN Gopher] Paul A. M. Dirac, Interview by Friedrich Hund (1982)...
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Paul A. M. Dirac, Interview by Friedrich Hund (1982) [video]
Author : mdp2021
Score : 114 points
Date : 2025-03-22 15:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| pm3003 wrote:
| 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...
| VMG wrote:
| Not an expert but this reads like typical DDR to me
| nforgerit wrote:
| Not an expert either, esp. because I'm too young and socialized
| in West Germany with family ties to Thuringia, though.
|
| What always struck me was Eastern Germans' tendency to
| practical things (and an enormous creativity in fixing broken
| stuff!). In addition, this is 1949 Eastern Germany, the country
| was devastated and this part under Soviet rule. It might sound
| a bit weird as a gift from today's wealthy point of view but
| historically "a good pair of shoes" was always something people
| appreciated throughout all times and cultures.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _historically "a good pair of shoes" was always something
| people appreciated throughout all times and cultures_
|
| (It seems I am indulging in anecdotes a bit in this page, but
| anyway) In the portrait of "Lenin" Ulyanov by Paul Johnson in
| _Modern Times_ , you will read
|
| > _Lenin left Zurich to return to Russia on 8 April 1917.
| [...] At Stockholm, comrade Karl Radek bought him a pair of
| shoes, but he refused other clothes, remarking sourly, 'I am
| not going to Russia to open a tailor's shop'._
| cess11 wrote:
| At the time clothes were typically made to last and did,
| with shoes being a weak point due to the harsher wear and
| tear of rubbing against the ground.
| dctoedt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A famous great anecdote about Dirac (and Bohr and Rutherford)
| was in _Absolute Zero Gravity_ :
|
| --
|
| _Young Dirac arrived at Niels Bohr's institute with a glowing
| recommendation from the great experimentalist Ernest
| Rutherford. A few months later, Bohr remarked to Rutherford
| that this marvelous Dirac hardly seemed so special: he said
| nothing and he did nothing. Legend has it that Rutherford
| replied with the following story:_
|
| _A man went to a pet shop to buy a parrot. There was a gray
| parrot that knew a few words selling for one hundred dollars.
| There was a blue parrot that could sing and tell stories for
| two hundred dollars. There was a beautiful green and purple
| bird that spoke several ancient languages for five hundred
| dollars. And there was a nondescript brown bird priced at a
| thousand dollars._
|
| _"A thousand dollars!" exclaimed the would-be buyer. "That
| must be some bird - how many languages does he speak?"_ _"Just
| English," admitted the shopkeeper._
|
| _"His vocabulary is extraordinary, perhaps?"_ _The shopkeeper
| shrugged. "Not really"._
|
| _"Does he sing, then?"_ _"No," said the shopkeeper. "Most days
| this parrot doesn't even talk"._
|
| _"Well, does he do acrobatic tricks or something? What on
| earth is so valuable about that parrot?"_
|
| _"Sir, this parrot thinks"._
|
| _Rutherford concluded, "Dirac thinks"._
| barrenko wrote:
| Beautiful.
| barrenko wrote:
| "There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet".
| amarcheschi wrote:
| The book "the strangest man" goes in depth about his life and
| how weird that guy was. No surprise a psychologist suggested me
| to read it while I talked about the possibility of being
| autistic. Of course you can't diagnose a dead person, but let's
| say it wouldn't have been surprising had he discovered to be nd
| mturmon wrote:
| I happen to be reading the book _Neurotribes_ which is a
| decent (although sometimes pathologizing) treatment of
| autism, and it retrospectively diagnoses Dirac as on the
| spectrum. Silberman, the author, does reference and seems to
| rely heavily on the biography _The Strangest Man_.
| yubblegum wrote:
| > 'Why do you dance?' Dirac asked [Heisenberg]. '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?'"
|
| The difference between a theoretician and a scientist.
| Heisenberg was clearly the scientist.
| cubefox wrote:
| I'm not a physicist, but it's very pleasant listening to a
| conversation between two old intellectuals.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| With regard to the "effect", what about listening to an
| intellectual hero of the beginning of the XX Century, and
| seeing him active near the end of the XX Century, discussing
| thus the experimental contributions of "radar" (1940), "atomic
| clock" (1955), "spacecrafts on Mars" (1964) and the "Viking
| lander" (1976)...
| koolala wrote:
| Was the Moon time discrepancy to atomic clocks ever proven or
| disproven?
| quantadev wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it's considered unproven about whether gravity
| is weakening over time, or that the passage of time is changing
| in any other way other than what General Relativity specifies,
| which is essentially an observer effect, and not a "change" in
| the strength of gravity itself or time.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| First I've heard of it. It's very safe to say that nothing ever
| came of any supposed discrepancy between physical (atomic) time
| and the time-related terms in Einstein's theories. Countless
| people doing science in countless places and contexts would
| have noticed any shenanigans along the lines of what they're
| discussing here.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Please note that there also exist video lectures from Dirac on
| YT:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GwctBldBvU
| DFHippie wrote:
| 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.
| leopd wrote:
| Same
| dkfmn wrote:
| Oppenheimer once wrote a letter of recommendation for Richard
| Feynman and called him: "a second Dirac, only this time human."
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| 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.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| Had to listen to see if Dirac had a Bristolian accent, but
| unfortunately not.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I think they are both talking in Received Pronunciation (RP).
| At first I almost thought Dirac was mimicking the slight German
| tinge, but he was also a fluent German speaker so maybe this
| was natural to him too. I remember reading he stopped speaking
| German during one of the world wars so not sure if he still did
| at this point.
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(page generated 2025-03-23 23:02 UTC)