Great article with a number of well-known references to biographies of Feynman. For those interested in Dirac, some excellent biographies have emerged over the years including: "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom" and "Dirac: A Scientific Biography ". [0][1].<p>[0] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002LDM8QS/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002LDM8QS/ref=dbs_a_def_r...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dirac-Scientific-Biography-Helge-Kragh/dp/0521380898/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Dirac+a+scientific+biography&qid=1617620520&sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Dirac-Scientific-Biography-Helge-Krag...</a>
When I read those papers, I feel, How much relaxed (less stressed) one must be to create this. Current dopamine inducing attention grabbing world makes it really difficult for such deep studies.
Look at Jørgen Veisdals other submissions on HN; 95% is articles he have written himself:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jorgenveisdal" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jorgenveisdal</a><p>I think this is impressive compared to most users in here.<p>Yes, this article is both written and submitted by Jørgen.
It's fascinating reading about giants of academia, that I've personally never thought to link together, interacting and disagreeing with one another in such a relatable way.<p>I wonder if anyone's written about a younger Dirac and any interactions he got into with his heros, and so on and so forth back as far as possible? I'm sure there's an amazing story to be told through following this "thread of knowledge" through time...
As an ex-physicist, these were the golden years of physics. Studying and then doing your PhD at that time must have been fascinating.<p>Today's physics really bland. Either we look into some fantasy worlds we will never test (quantum foam & co), or extremely niche ones.<p>My sons are fascinated by science and I am lightly driving them towards biology (biophysics, bioinformatics, ...) because I feel this is where the revolutionary changes happen and will happen.
This comment is not very popular, especially in America, but Feynman was by and large a showman. His most celebrated publication is path integral approach. Dirac had a paper earlier (known as Dirac’s little paper), so did Norbert Wiener in a different context, on this approach. They didn’t pursue path integrals, as they could not (and still people can’t) make sense of them rigorously. Feynman looked up that paper and expanded on it.<p>He also drew useful diagrams, but you know ... :)