A x B ≠ B x A

Letters

Vol. 31 No. 5 · 12 March 2009

From Jeremy Bernstein

While it is certainly true that Dirac was a man of relatively few words, as David Kaiser makes clear, it is easy to exaggerate his reluctance to speak (LRB, 26 February). During the 1958-59 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton he frequently had dinner in the cafeteria with young people like myself. He entered into our conversations, sometimes with quite unexpected comments. On one occasion I had asked a colleague what Hans Bethe – a very successful consultant and a well-paid professor at Cornell who even so lived quite modestly – did with his money. My colleague said he thought that Bethe invested it. ‘Maybe he loses it,’ Dirac commented. On another occasion, during a discussion of scientific collaboration, a colleague asked Dirac if he had ever collaborated. ‘The really good ideas,’ he said, ‘are had only by one person.’

Oppenheimer, the director of the institute, did not provide phones in individual offices on the grounds that they might be distracting. Instead, we had a hall phone that distracted everyone. One day, when Abraham Pais was in my office, we heard Dirac talking to a newspaper reporter on the phone. The reporter evidently wanted an advance copy of a talk that Dirac was going to give. Something about the conversation must have troubled him because he came into the office to ask Pais’s advice about sending the manuscript. Pais suggested writing on it: ‘Do not publish in any form.’ Dirac stood silently thinking while Pais and I continued our conversation. He then asked: ‘Isn’t “in any form” redundant in that sentence?’

Jeremy Bernstein
New York