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Graham Farmelo

biographer and science writer

Graham Farmelo (born 18 May 1953 in London) is a biographer and science writer with a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from the University of Liverpool. His 2009 biography The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius won the Biography Award at the 2009 Costa Book Awards.

Quotes

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  • ... One of the most vocal skeptics is the Standard-Model pioneer Martin Veltman: 'String theory is mumbo jumbo. It has nothing to do with experiment.'...
    But is clear from the comments that Dirac repeatedly made in his lectures on the way theoretical physics should be done that he would have disagreed with those criticisms: he would have counselled string theorists to let the theory's beauty lead them by the hand, not to worry about the lack of experimental support and not be deterred if a few observations appear to refute it. But he would have cautioned string theorists to be modest, to keep an open mind and never to assume that they are within sight of the end of fundamental physics. If past experience is anything to go by, another revolution will eventually follow.
    Such was the advice of this extraordinarily unemotional man offered to his colleagues: be guided, above all, by your emotions.
  • As every physicist knows, Dirac was, in the words of Niels Bohr, "the strangest man of quantum mechanics" — someone deeply private, of very, very few words, rectilinear in thinking, virtually, apparently devoid of empathy with other human beings, always an outsider.
  • A physicist friend of mine once had a terrible spate of misfortune. Her flat was burgled, her cat was run over, and her grandfather died, all in the same week. Needing a bit of TLC, she went to see her professor, who offered three words of advice: “Do some physics.” For most people who are in need of consolation, I suspect physics is among the last things they would consider. Tim Radford, a former Guardian science editor, wants to persuade them that the branch of science so many people find soulless and intimating can offer much spiritual balm. He makes his case in what he calls a “love letter to physics”.
    ...
    For me, the main joy of physics is that it puts human beings so firmly in our place. Even if all of us – and every other living thing – died tomorrow, every quantum in the universe would carry on obliviously, doing its eternal, orderly dance to fundamental laws that we shall probably never discover. If you’re not a scientist, that thought may not be very consoling. But I’m just happy to keep on doing some physics.
  • (18 August 2018)"Review: The Consolations of Physics: Why the Wonders of the Universe Can Make You Happy by Tim Radford". The Guardian.
  • 'Einstein is completely cuckoo'. That is how the cocky young Robert Oppenheimer described the world's most famous scientist in early 1935, after visiting him in Princeton. ... Einstein had been trying for a decade to develop an ambitious new theory in ways that demonstrated, in the view of Oppenheimer and others, that the sage of Princeton had lost the plot. Einstein was virtually ignoring matter on the smallest scale, using quantum theory. He was seeking an ambitious new theory, not in response to puzzling experimental discoveries, but as an intellectual exercise—using only his imagination, underpinned by mathematics. Although this approach was unpopular among his peers, he was pioneering a method similar to what some of his most distinguished successors are now using successfully at the frontiers of research.
  • ‘The greatest living theoretical physicist’ – many commentators in the past few decades have described Steven Weinberg in such terms. When I rather cheekily asked him what he thought of that statement, he shot back: ‘It is quite ridiculous to rank scientists like that’, adding with a twinkle in his eye, ‘but it would be impolite to dispute the conclusion’. That reply was classic Weinberg: self-aware, intimidatingly direct but always ready to lighten the moment with humour.
  • Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I think that there is plenty of room for a small number of forums where the people who are very doubtful about the way that string theory is going can talk to their critics.
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