Paul Dirac, one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century, was a very quiet man, so much so, that his colleagues in Cambridge jokingly defined a unit called "dirac", which meant one word per hour!





But whenever he did a little bit of speaking, Dirac used to extend his abstract thinking to interpret the world literally. This inevitably led him to being an anecdote generator throughout his life and many stories about him abound.

Why do you dance?

In 1929, Dirac and Heisenberg were on board a ship to Japan for attending annual science conference. Werner Heisenberg who happened to be quite a ladies man, used to dance with the young girls on the ship before dinners, while Dirac used to sit watching.









One such evening, Dirac asked, "Heisenberg, why do you dance?"





"When there are nice girls, dancing with them is a pleasure," Heisenberg replied.





Dirac pondered this notion for a while, then blurted out: "But, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?"





Heisenberg burst out with laughter.









Physics versus poetry





Dirac and Oppenheimer spent some time together in Göttingen. The two young physicists from different parts of the world had become good friends. Then, in one of these days, Dirac noticed that Oppenheimer wrote poetry.





Dirac asserted, "Robert, I do not understand how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time."









"Why not?" Oppenheimer asked.





"In physics, you want to tell something that nobody knew before, in words which everyone can understand. In poetry, however, you go on to describe something that everybody knows about, in incomprehensible ways."





Oppenheimer was left too confused to respond to that.





"You see," Dirac went on to say, "The two are incompatible!"





His comments would strike people as odd at first but they would quickly realize that Dirac made perfect logical sense.









Finish this sentence



Once, Dirac and Bohr were seated in the same room. Niels Bohr, known for being a perfectionist, was writing a scientific paper while mumbling at the same time as was his habit.









After some time, Bohr became really frustrated and stopped. He complained, “I do not know how to finish this damn sentence!”