When the phone rang on 9 November 1933, the exceptionally gifted yet eccentric Paul Dirac was a little taken back to hear a voice from Stockholm tell him he had won the Nobel Prize.
1933年11月9日，當電話鈴響時，極具天賦但性格古怪的保羅·狄拉克(Paul Dirac)有點吃驚地聽到斯德哥爾摩的一個聲音告訴他他獲得了諾貝爾獎。
The looming press attention, which had always surrounded the Nobels, made the reclusive Dirac consider rejecting the award, until Ernest Rutherford – JJ Thomson’s former student and successor as Cavendish professor – advised him that a 「refusal will get you more publicity」.
媒體的關注一直圍繞著諾貝爾獎，時常出現的媒體關注使隱居的狄拉克考慮拒絕該獎項，直到歐內斯特•盧瑟福(Ernest Rutherford)建議他「拒絕會讓你得到更多的關注」。盧瑟福曾是JJ湯姆森的學生，也是卡文迪什大學教授的繼任者。
Under different circumstances Rutherford had been similarly 「startled」 when he found out he was to be given a Nobel – a physicist through and through, he was awarded the 1908 Prize in Chemistry, joking his sudden 「metamorphosis into a chemist」 was very unexpected.
在不同的情況下，盧瑟福在發現自己將被授予諾貝爾獎時也同樣感到「震驚」——他是一個徹頭徹尾的物理學家，卻被授予1908年的化學獎，他開玩笑說他突然「變成化學家」是非常意外的。
Quantum theorists: Wolfgang Pauli and Paul Dirac, 1938. Credit: CERNQuantum theorists: Wolfgang Pauli and Paul Dirac, 1938. Credit: CERN
Dirac shared the 1933 physics prize with Erwin Schrödinger – famed for his eponymous equation and dead-and-alive cat – for their contributions to quantum mechanics.
狄拉克與埃爾溫·薛丁格(Erwin Schrodinger)分享了1933年的物理學獎，以表彰他們對量子力學的貢獻。薛丁格以他的同名方程式和《死貓和活貓》(dead-and-alive cat)而聞名。