"Being a great theoretical physicist, Dirac liked to theorize about all the problems of daily life, rather than to find solutions by direct experiment," George Gamow once recalled. "At a party in Copenhagen, he proposed a theory according to which there must be a certain distance at which a woman's face looks its best. He argued that at d = infinite one cannot see anything anyway, while at d = 0 the oval of the face is deformed because of the small aperture of the human eye, and many other imperfections (such as small wrinkles) become exaggerated. Thus there is a certain optimum distance at which the face looks its best. 'Tell me, Paul,' I asked, 'how close have you seen a woman's face?' 'Oh,' replied Dirac, holding his palms about two feet apart, 'about that close.'"
Sources
George Gamow, Thirty Years That Shook Physics
