Paul A. M. Dirac, Interview by Friedrich Hund (1982) [video]

A famous great anecdote about Dirac (and Bohr and Rutherford) was in Absolute Zero Gravity:

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Young Dirac arrived at Niels Bohr’s institute with a glowing recommendation from the great experimentalist Ernest Rutherford. A few months later, Bohr remarked to Rutherford that this marvelous Dirac hardly seemed so special: he said nothing and he did nothing. Legend has it that Rutherford replied with the following story:

A man went to a pet shop to buy a parrot. There was a gray parrot that knew a few words selling for one hundred dollars. There was a blue parrot that could sing and tell stories for two hundred dollars. There was a beautiful green and purple bird that spoke several ancient languages for five hundred dollars. And there was a nondescript brown bird priced at a thousand dollars.

“A thousand dollars!” exclaimed the would-be buyer. “That must be some bird - how many languages does he speak?” “Just English,” admitted the shopkeeper.

“His vocabulary is extraordinary, perhaps?” The shopkeeper shrugged. “Not really”.

“Does he sing, then?” “No,” said the shopkeeper. “Most days this parrot doesn’t even talk”.

“Well, does he do acrobatic tricks or something? What on earth is so valuable about that parrot?”

“Sir, this parrot thinks”.

Rutherford concluded, “Dirac thinks”.

"There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet".

The book "the strangest man" goes in depth about his life and how weird that guy was. No surprise a psychologist suggested me to read it while I talked about the possibility of being autistic. Of course you can't diagnose a dead person, but let's say it wouldn't have been surprising had he discovered to be nd

> 'Why do you dance?' Dirac asked [Heisenberg]. 'When there are nice girls, it is a pleasure,' Heisenberg replied. Dirac pondered this notion, then blurted out: 'But, Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice?'"

The difference between a theoretician and a scientist. Heisenberg was clearly the scientist.

With regard to the "effect", what about listening to an intellectual hero of the beginning of the XX Century, and seeing him active near the end of the XX Century, discussing thus the experimental contributions of "radar" (1940), "atomic clock" (1955), "spacecrafts on Mars" (1964) and the "Viking lander" (1976)...

Not an expert but this reads like typical DDR to me

Not an expert either, esp. because I'm too young and socialized in West Germany with family ties to Thuringia, though.

What always struck me was Eastern Germans' tendency to practical things (and an enormous creativity in fixing broken stuff!). In addition, this is 1949 Eastern Germany, the country was devastated and this part under Soviet rule. It might sound a bit weird as a gift from today's wealthy point of view but historically "a good pair of shoes" was always something people appreciated throughout all times and cultures.

Vouchers were common under communist rule in periods of scarcity.

I can imagine 1949 East Germany to not have overabundance of shoes maybe.

I think they are both talking in Received Pronunciation (RP). At first I almost thought Dirac was mimicking the slight German tinge, but he was also a fluent German speaker so maybe this was natural to him too. I remember reading he stopped speaking German during one of the world wars so not sure if he still did at this point.

Same

I'm pretty sure it's considered unproven about whether gravity is weakening over time, or that the passage of time is changing in any other way other than what General Relativity specifies, which is essentially an observer effect, and not a "change" in the strength of gravity itself or time.

First I've heard of it. It's very safe to say that nothing ever came of any supposed discrepancy between physical (atomic) time and the time-related terms in Einstein's theories. Countless people doing science in countless places and contexts would have noticed any shenanigans along the lines of what they're discussing here.