Dirac was notably laconic with strangers. When he was in Madison in the
Spring of 1929 as a visiting professor
at the University of Wisconsin, invited by J.H. Van Vleck, he was interviewed
by Roundy Coughlin, a columnist for the Wisconsin State Journal.
The full text of Roundy's account of the interview is quoted by Helga Kragh in
Dirac, A Scientific Biography (Cambridge, 1990), p. 72. The abbreviated
version below is from Abdus Salam's
article in Tributes to Paul Dirac, J.G. Taylor, editor (Adam Hilger,
Bristol, 1987), p. 91.
© Loyal Durand, 1999