He spoke so sparingly that his Cambridge colleagues invented a unit of measurement for silence and named it after him: one Dirac, defined as one word per hour. With that same precision, he predicted the existence of antimatter years before anyone observed it in a lab. This episode is a deep dive into Paul Dirac, the British theoretical physicist who stands shoulder to shoulder with Newton and Einstein and whose mind operated almost entirely through equations.

We trace the path: a brutal Bristol upbringing under a domineering Swiss-immigrant father, an electrical engineering degree he could not find work with, the redirection into mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge under Ralph Fowler, and the explosive 1928 publication of the Dirac equation, which fused quantum mechanics with special relativity for the electron and force ...