While I was traveling last week I was lugging around an incredibly fascinating book called The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom. Dirac was one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. He predicted the existence of anti-matter, mathematically, before there was any experimental basis for it. He won a Nobel Prize when he was 31. The main reason he’s not a household name, as far as I can tell, is that he was too nerdy even by the standards of physicists.

Niels Bohr was apparently a jolly and highly sociable individual. Feynman was positively charming. Dirac was just in another league of nerdiness. He wasn’t witty and media-friendly like Einstein. He was the un-Einstein. The Unstein.