Vox Populi
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David Kirby: The Strangest Man
Paul Dirac was the youngest theoretician to win
the Nobel Prize in Physics. His prediction
of antimatter is one of the greatest events
in the history of science. Einstein described
Dirac as “balancing on the dizzy path between
genius and madness,” and Niels Bohr said
Dirac was simply “the strangest man.”
The chair he held at Cambridge was occupied
at one time by Isaac Newton, and, after
Dirac was lured to my university, by Stephen Hawking.
I stood in line behind Paul Dirac once on the tarmac
at the Tallahassee airport; his hair blew
this way and that in the wind, and a corked,
half-empty wine bottle protruded from
one pocket of the filthiest raincoat I’d ever seen.
I’m not making this up. When people say someone
is intelligent, usually they just mean that person
is intelligent in the way other people are.
Dirac was said to join his colleagues at noon,
unpack his lunch box, eat, pack up his lunch box,
and leave without having said anything.
Atoms are not things, said Werner Heisenberg.
At the atomic level, the world of time
and space as we know it no longer exists.
If we ask if the electron is at rest, we must say no.
If we ask if it is in motion, we must say no.
So, yeah, sure: Paul Dirac was the strangest man.
Paul Dirac was the only man who wasn’t strange.
Poet, critic, and scholar David Kirby grew up on a farm in southern Louisiana. Since 1969 he has taught at Florida State University, where he has received several teaching awards. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, poet Barbara Hamby. His many books include Help Me Information (LSU, 2021).
Poem copyright 2024 David Kirby. All rights reserved.
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David Kirby, YOU are brilliant! Bravo!
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Love this… the ending is perfection!
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Isn’t it, though?
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The coat, the lunchbox, the black box of the human mind. Antimatter matters. Good stuff, David.
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I agree with George & Jim — and love the poem too! At6:20 in the morning “You can’t un-paradox a paradox” is wildly shaking awake my still sleepy brain!
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Dirac was a paradoxologist (if there is such a word). Not being a physicist, I’ve had to take it on faith that quantum physics and the like is reality at a seemingly dizzy level.
I like the stories David Kirby has incorporated of Dirac the man: silent, shabby, with a protruding wine bottle either half full or half empty. Meanwhile, his was a life spent changing the understanding of the world.
Closer to the stereotype of the mad scientist rather than the absent minded professor, he was neither, was he?
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Thanks, Jim!
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Love this poem. The last two lines perfectly illustrate Bohr’s
complementarity—that is, that you can’t un-paradox a paradox,
whether those of quantum behavior or of Dirac!
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Yes!!!
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COMPLEMENTARITY
Question:
Was Dirac, then, the strangest man,
Or the only man who wasn’t strange?
Answer:
He was, and he wasn’t.
Conclusion:
One can’t un-paradox a paradox
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