Physiker und Lyriker

Beautiful equations are as concise as haikus and as compelling as verse, writes Graham Farmelo.

Who was the 20th century’s greatest English-speaking poet? TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Sylvia Plath? Not for me; my nomination is the theoretician Paul Dirac, honorary poet laureate of modern physics. … Dirac’s most famous poem enabled him successfully to predict the existence of antimatter, a triumph that his colleague, the quantum pioneer Werner Heisenberg, judged to be the supreme achievement of 20th-century physics./ The Guardian , Thursday February 21, 2002

It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science, published this month by Granta, Ł20.