狄拉克的研究生生活与导师
2014-01-04 20:38阅读：
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 conte
