I first watched Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey in the mid 90’s and I remember being struck by the power of its visual imagery. In the enduring years I probably saw the film another 2 or 3 times. Yesterday evening I watched again, this time thinking about how and why this film appealed so much to of one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and shared the Nobel Prize in physics for 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger, "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory."
As I read about Dirac, one learns that he hardly spoke unnecessarily. In fact people who knew Dirac well coined the word “a Dirac” meaning, amusingly the smallest number of words spoken in an hour and still be involved in a conversation. Interestingly, it takes almost 25 minutes before a word is spoken in 2001.
In the late 1920s Dirac unified special relativity and plank’s quantum effects, unravel the vacuum and explained what is really taking place in empty space. This is regarded by many, as one of the greatest achievements in mathematics and physics in the 20th century leading to a new picture of [nothing].
2001’s appeal for Dirac helps give us an insight how he managed this achievement. As Kubrick himself said 2001 is a demonstration that a really good film script can be made without many words but with the power of visual imagery. Dirac had a very strong sense of what his equations were telling him visually.
