Aspie/HFA physicists

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Dirac was known among his colleagues for his precise and taciturn nature. When Niels Bohr complained that he did not know how to finish a sentence in a scientific article he was writing, Dirac replied, "I was taught at school never to start a sentence without knowing the end of it."[11] When asked about his views on poetry, he responded, "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite".[12]

Some psychologists, including Simon Baron-Cohen have speculated that Dirac may have suffered from Asperger syndrome, an autistic spectrum disorder, due to his taciturn nature, and logical rather than emotional mindset.[13] Dirac himself wrote in his diary during his postgraduate years that he concentrated solely on his research, and only stopped on Sunday, when he took long strolls alone.

Dirac was also noted for his personal modesty. He called the equation for the time-evolution of a quantum-mechanical operator, which Dirac was in fact the first to write down, the "Heisenberg equation of motion". Most physicists speak of Fermi-Dirac statistics for half-integer spin particles and Bose-Einstein statistics for integer spin particles. While lecturing later in life, Dirac always insisted on calling the former "Fermi statistics". He referred to the latter as "Einstein statistics" for reasons, he explained, of "symmetry".