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狄拉克的研究生生活与导师

(2014-01-04 20:38:08)
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狄拉克

量子力学

形式逻辑

 分类： 高等量子力学
On Monday, 1 October 1923, when he walked through the stone portals of St John ’s College to register his arrival, he entered an unfamiliar world of tradition, camaraderie and privilege.

College life reflected the origins of British academia. The earliest scholars had been monks, all wearing the same clothes, and all going about their contemplative lives within an agreed set of timetables and rules. In 1923, all the official students of the college and the rest of the university were male, each of them required to wear a gown and mortarboard in public. Any student who went into town incorrectly attired knew he ran the risk of being nabbed by one of the university’s private policemen (proctors or ‘progs’) or their 
assistants (‘bulldogs’), who roamed the streets after dusk. A transgression of the dress code was punished by a fine of 6s 8d, no laughing matter for any young man keen to preserve his spare money, though not nearly as serious as the penalty for being caught with a woman in his room.

The students were waited on hand and foot. By 6 a. m., the invariably female bed-makers (‘bedders’) were hanging around the stone staircases, ready to begin their morning’s work. The gyps – man-servants –were available all day
to clean, wash up and run errands for the students and for the Fellows (also known as‘dons’). Such service was not, however, available to young Dirac in his first year. He spent it in a cold and damp shoebox of a room in a four-storey Victorian house, a fifteen-minute walk from St John’s, sharing with two other lodgers. At a cost of almost £15 a term, the landlady Miss Josephine Brown delivered coals and wood for their fires, supplied gas for the lamps that lit their musty little rooms, provided them with crockery and cleaned their boots. Like all the other landladies approved by the university,
Miss Brown was obliged to keep a record of any failure of Dirac’s to return home by 10 p.m. Always early to bed, he would not have given her any trouble.

Dirac had his first experience of grand dining in Hall, where he took his meals. The room is magnificently appointed, with an elaborately decorated wooden ceiling, Gothic stained-glass windows and dark-wood panels hung with portraits of some of the college’s most distinguished alumni, including William Wordsworth. The formalities began at 7.30 p.m. with the arrival of the procession of Fellows and other senior members of college at their long table, under the calm gaze of Lady Margaret, whose portrait in oils hung above them. The students were already seated in their gowns along the six rows of benches, either side of three long rows of tables, each of them set with crisp white linen tablecloths, the college coat of arms worked into the damask.

It was expected that every head should be dutifully cocked, every pair of hands solemnly crossed in silence as one of the students read the Latin grace from a tablet. The moment he finished, a hundred conversations surged to fill the hall.

The menus, written by hand in French, described the three courses in a style that would meet the approval of a Paris gourmet. The meal might begin with scalloped cod or lentil soup, move on to a main course of jugged hare or boiled tongue and end with gooseberry pie and cream or a plate of cheese with cress and radishes, or even sardines on toast. Much of this rich food was wasted on Dirac, whose poor digestion made him favour more basic fare, which he ate slowly and in only modest quantities.

Dirac’s fellow diners consisted mainly of the young men of the Brideshead generation (in Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Charles Rider and Sebastian Flyte were then beginning their final year over in Oxford). Most of them had been privately educated at schools such as Eton, Harrow and Rugby, where they had 
learned Latin and Greek and the art of discoursing easily about the fashionable topics of the day, such as T. S. Eliot’s modernist poetry, or of passing supercilious judgement on Shaw’s latest provocation. Dirac was ill equipped to join them.

Every night, alcohol circulated up and down the dinner table in Hall, loosening the students’ tongues, freeing them to shout ever more loudly to make themselves heard over the din. Amid the cacophony, Dirac sat impassively, a teetotaller in the Methodist tradition, silently sipping water from his 
glass. He had left Bristol never having consumed a cup of tea or coffee, so his first sampling of these drinks was an event for him. Neither much appealed to him, though he did have the occasional weak and milky tea, its caffeine dose scarcely exceeding homoeopathic levels. Decades later, he told one of his children that he drank coffee only to give himself courage before giving a presentation.

Dirac’s manner at the dinner table became the stuff of legend. He had no interest in small talk, and it was common for him to sit through several courses without saying a word or even acknowledging the students sitting next to him. Too diffident even to ask someone to pass the salt and pepper, he made no demands at all on his fellow diners and felt no obligation to maintain the momentum of any dialogue. Every opening conversational gambit would be met with silence or with a simple yes or no. According to one story still in 
circulation in St John’s College, Dirac once responded to the comment ‘It’s a bit rainy, isn’t it?’ by walking to the window, returning to his seat, and then stating ‘It is not now raining.’ Such behaviour quickly persuaded his colleagues that further questioning was both unwelcome and pointless. Yet he did prefer to eat in company and to hear intelligent people 
talking about serious matters, and it was by listening to such conversations that Dirac slowly learned about llife outside science.

He was fortunate to go up to Cambridge at this time. The colleges had just seen the departure of the last students in military uniform, which took precedence over academic dress until the students were officially demobilised. Now that Britain was under no threat of another international conflict, this 
was an optimistic time, and the next generation of students was anxious to get back to academic work. Dirac was studying in the university’s largest department, mathematics, famous for its high standards and its competitiveness. Among the students, the highest cachet was reserved for those who both excelled in their studies and who competed successfully in sport, which is why Hassé had thought it relevant to remark in his reference for Dirac that he ‘played no games’. Most students took at least some part in the social life in Cambridge –chatting in the new coffee bars, singing in 
choirs, slipping out in the evening to the cinema or to see an ancient Greek play. None of this interested Dirac. Even by the standards of the most ambitious swot, he was exceptionally focused on his work, though dedication is no guarantee of success, as thousands of students find out every year. He had
been consistently top of the class in the academic backwater of Bristol, but he had no idea whether he would be able to compete with the best students in Cambridge. From the moment Dirac and his colleagues arrived, the dons were watching every one of them, always on the lookout for a student of truly exceptional calibre – in Cambridge parlance, ‘a first-rate man’.

It did not take long for the extent of Dirac’s talent to become clear to his supervisor, Fowler, who took a brisk interest in his progress, giving him carefully chosen problems to tackle, constantly encouraging him to hone his mathematics. Students who brought Fowler a good piece of work were rewarded with his favourite exclamation, ‘Splendid!’, and, more often than not, a pat on the back. He was an inspirational presence in the department, but sometimes unpopular: by spending much of his time working at home or on trips to the Continental centres of physics, he often frustrated the students who yearned for the succour of his advice. But Dirac was not so dependent; he was content to be lightly supervised, to work alone and to generate many of his own projects. Soon, he realised that he had been lucky to have been allocated the most effective supervisor of theoretical physics in Cambridge.

Fowler’s manner was unique in the mathematics department. The prevailing culture was intensely formal, and the academics – every one of them male and dressed like a banker – kept their heads down in their offices and college 
rooms. The use of first names was all but forbidden: even the friendliest of colleagues referred to each other by their surnames and, outside the common room, conversations rarely lasted longer than politeness deemed necessary. 
Opportunities for them to meet outside the college were minimal as there was no tradition of communal tea and coffee breaks and no programme of seminars. Nor was there any of the staff–student socialising now almost de rigueur in 
modern university life. Apart from Fowler’s guidance, Dirac was left to his own devices. He soon settled into a private routine that would have rendered him invisible among the thousands of his fellow students. With no room of his 
own in the department, he worked on problems that Fowler set him, read recommended books and the latest journals and reviewed the notes he had made during the lectures. He relaxed only on Sundays. If the weather was fine, he set off in the morning for a few hours’ walk, dressed in the suit he
wore all week, his hands joined behind his back, both feet pointing outwards as he made his way around the countryside in his metronomic stride. One of his colleagues said he looked like ‘the bridegroom in an Italian wedding photograph’.

Dirac would put his calculations firmly at the back of his mind, aiming to clear his head so that he could approach his work fresh on Monday morning. Pausing only to eat his packed lunch, he looked every inch the city gent inspecting the local countryside: to the north, there was the winding valley of the river Great Ouse and to the east, the geometrical network of fenland drains and Tudor-style buildings with their Dutch gables. He would return in time for dinner at St John’s and then walk back to his digs through the foggy backstreets of Cambridge, most of them unlit. On Monday morning, he was ready for another six days’uninterrupted study. 

The Strangest Man

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