What proportion of physicists are autistic?

[Evo]

What about new beard styles flowing out from The Hobbit? Are they okay?

Toe hair.

 

[arildno]

Toe hair.

Toe hairy, they too?
I never scrutinized my dwarves' toes properly..

 

[Andre]

Toe hairy, they too?
I never scrutinized my dwarves' toes properly..

About this particular anatomy of hobbits, please take note of this

http://once-upon-a-hobbit.blogspot.nl/2009/06/funny-hobbit-toes.html

Amazing how incredibly off topic we got here. So let me assure Mentalist, Arild from No and Lisa with a B that I don't see any weirdness. Maybe just the lack of herd instinct.

 

[Len M]

It was speculated that Paul Dirac was autistic in "The Strangest Man" a biography of Dirac by Graham Farmelo. A review is here:
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/dr-strange

On a side note, I read a piece from the Observer some years ago on Dirac when it was claimed that he was unaware that the second world war was being fought whilst he was at Cambridge! I was staggered at the time I read this, but have never seen any repeat of that claim, so it may be pure fiction.

A short extract from the review:

At the close of the book, Farmelo attempts to synthesize all of the disparate parts into a coherent whole, to provide a single explanation for both the astonishing scientific creativity and the general wackiness of Paul Dirac. The explanation comes a bit abruptly: Farmelo believes that Dirac was autistic. Properly, Farmelo advises caution in making historical diagnoses, because “rather too often, people are labelled autistic on the flimsiest of evidence except that they are exceptionally reserved, focused and unsociable.” And, yet, this is precisely the kind of evidence we are offered: the Dirac stories, the fact that (according to Simon Baron-Cohen, whom Farmelo interviewed) autistic men often marry foreign women (as did Dirac), and a few other supposed correlations. There is no question Dirac was a strange man. He might even have been autistic. But there is simply not enough to go on to risk staking such a strong claim at the end of an otherwise lovely and charming book.