Paul Dirac and the Town of Saint-Maurice in Switzerland

Abstract

directions so that others may follow in your tracks. T he following story is about the ignorance of one’s neighborhood’s past. It started in the 1960s, when I attended high school at the College of the Abbey of Saint-Maurice, in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland. Among my schoolmates were some by the name of Dirac, for example, Christian and Georges-Albert. Saint-Maurice (Figure 1) is a small town located east of Lac Leman (Geneva, which gives the lake its English name, is located on the lake’s western tip) 30 km southeast of Montreux, on the way from Paris to Rome crossing the Great Saint Bernard or the Simplon Pass. The ‘‘via Francigena,’’ the pilgrim path of Archbishop Sigeric leading from Canterbury in England to Rome, runs through the narrow canyon of the Rhone at that location. Several Diracs are still living in the town (Figure 2). We students did not know much about the Abbey. It had been founded in 515 to commemorate the third-century massacre of a legion which, according to some accounts, had come from Thebes (today’s Luxor) in Egypt to fight alongside the Romans. At that time the latter worshipped their own gods; they killed their Theban allies in SaintMaurice as these refused to obey Emperor Maximian’s order to persecute Christians. Although we knew that the Abbey had been called ‘‘Royal,’’ had its own Bishop, and that one of its chapels hosted an important treasure (Figure 3), my recollection is that most of us did not view the town as such an exceptional place. Paul Dirac surely was mentioned during my mathematics studies, but I perceived that just as a coincidence. When later encountering Dirac’s delta in the United States, I should have been puzzled by the fact that it was pronounced the French way, but I was not. Only much later, when back in Switzerland, did I come across an article [1] in the College’s journal, in which my physics teacher explained that, in fact, the famous scientist was directly related to my Dirac schoolmates! Indeed, although Paul never lived in Switzerland, he was a Swiss citizen until the age of 17. In 1919 his father revoked the family’s burghership of Saint-Maurice in favor of the English nationality to avoid paying the high fees of English universities for the education of his children. (In Switzerland, the place of birth is irrelevant for the citizenship: one is first a ‘‘burgher’’ of the town of one’s father or mother; this automatically implies the nationality.) You might know Paul Dirac’s third name, ‘‘Maurice’’: it is a hint at the town of origin of his forefathers. Some Dirac family members from Saint-Maurice were invited to London in 1995, when a memorial plaque in honor of Paul was unveiled near Newton’s monument in Westminster Abbey. On August 1, 1991, a garden was dedicated to Paul in Saint-Maurice, a few yards from the train station (Figure 4). It contains a monument carrying the