A Rare Letter of Physicist Paul Dirac, Offering a Fellow Scientist a Fellowship at Cambridge’s Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics

This letter was acquired from the Nandor Balazs descendants and has never before been offered for sale

Paul Dirac is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. He made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics, and he predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory”. He also made significant contributions to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics. Dirac was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character. In a 1926 letter to Paul Ehrenfest, Albert Einstein wrote of Dirac, “This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful”. In 1968, He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.

After receiving his PhD,Nandor Balázs spent two years (1951 and 1952) as assistant to Erwin Schroedinger at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, one year (autumn 1952 through summer 1953) as assistant to Einstein at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and was Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Alabama from 1953–56. In 1961 he went to Stony Brook University. During his life, Balázs had close friendships and working collaborations with Schroedinger and Paul Dirac, whose wife, Margit Wigner, was also Hungarian.

In 1967, Dirac wrote to Balazs to arrange a temporary position for him at Cambridge.

Autograph letter signed, Cambridge, May 3, 1967, to Nandor Balazs. “Dear Nandy, I spoke with Prof. Batchelor about your coming to Cambridge for the period Jan-March 1968. He is the head of DAMTP (Dept of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics). He said you would be welcome as a Senior Visitor attached to DAMTP. You would be given accommodation and of course you could use libraries and attend colloquia. The weather has turned rather cold.”

Letters of Dirac are very uncommon. Public records show only 3 having reached the market in the past 40 years. This is particularly nice, in that it shows him conducting his work at Cambridge with a fellow scientist.

This letter was acquired from the Balazs descendants and has never before been offered for sale. Comes with a letter from Mrs. Dirac.