Peter Goddard

Note the sub-title: this book consists of four lectures about Dirac, his work and developments from it in physics and mathematics, plus Hawking's laughably ignorant memorial address. (He repeatedly insulted his hosts for delaying for 11 years an event that was, in fact, only one year beyond the minimum requirement of ten years post Dirac's death.)

Only the first lecture is really biographical and even that takes time out to discuss Dirac's scientific contributions. From there the book gets progressively more technically challenging, ending with a lecture on the Dirac operator and spinors that in detail is going to be incomprehensible to anyone without an advanced working knowledge of topology. (The gist is that we have no clue what spinors mean, geometrically, in the way we know what vectors and tensors are, for example.)

In between, there's good stuff on antimatter from prediction to present day understanding and similarly Dirac's magnetic monopoles then to now.

Much of this book will go over the heads of the casual reader and if you want anything more than a cursory biography, you will also need to look elsewhere, but for physicists, it's a worthwhile publication.… (altro)

There are a small number of lives that support endless biographies – Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain come to mind. And Glenn Gould. He was such a polymath, such a pianist, such a presence, such a crazy, that reading more of the same remains endlessly diverting. The Great Gould is a short book, made shorter by terrific photos, but Peter Goddard has added still more to the memories and the mysteries - delightfully.

Gould, who died of several strokes right after his 50th birthday in 1982, had not given a public performance since 1964. He channeled his musical abilities into recordings, film soundtracks and other projects. He hung out at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) studios in Toronto, where he insinuated his way into mainly radio but also television programs, as guest, as story producer, as performer, as host. He liked to create radio characters and make up their accents and speech mannerisms. He loved to escape – anywhere by car – and often did. Very often it was to his parents’ lakeside cottage on Lake Simcoe, where Stephen Leacock wrote about small town Canadian life before the first world war. This was not your father’s concert pianist.

Toronto, Ontario and Canada for that matter were all small town, and everyone seems to have known everyone, crossing paths, collaborating or just knowing of each other in the very small celebrity pool. This has given Goddard the ability to tap others’ memories and relate his own. The book is therefore a nice, human scale mix.

Gould began as the classic child prodigy, owned and operated by his mother, and he never grew out of it. He never married, but became inwardly focused, with numerous conditions, doctors and medications, constant complaints, and of course his famous ticks – heavy overcoat in June, gloves all the time, heating his arms and hands in hot water before a performance…

The arguments over whether he was a brilliant pianist or a sitting disaster are here too, but they show themselves to be irrelevant. Gould moved people. His musical decisions were controversial. He cut, he muted, he slowed – annoying the purists, confusing the journeymen, and bringing joy to millions. He was always worth listening to.

He seemed oblivious to fame, and simply wanted to keep exploring his own possibilities. It is a unique journey.

David Wineberg… (altro)