He insisted his father speak only French at the dinner table — so Dirac grew up barely talking at all. That silence shaped everything. He became so famously terse that colleagues invented a unit called the "dirac": one word per hour. But this near-mute man predicted antimatter in 1928, before anyone had seen a single particle of it. Four years later, scientists found it. He left behind the Dirac equation — still printed on a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey, next to Newton.
August 8, 1902
124 years ago
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