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"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 the case of poetry, its the exact opposite!"
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Paul DiracLet me backtrack... to the 1920s when quantum mechanics was created. . — Paul Dirac
"Let me backtrack... to the 1920s when quantum mechanics was created. ...[O]ne of the things that the originators of quantum mechanics... were very unhappy about was that quantum mechanics was not compatible with the special theory of relativity. ...Attempts were made to create a theory of the electron that is consistent with relativity, and one person made such a theory, but it was inconsistent with the electron spin. Another person made a theory that was consistent with electron spin, but not consistent with relativity. Until finally... a then young man... Paul Dirac created the theory of an equation that correctly describes the electron, and is relativistic, and also includes the description of spin... [T]hat was the beginning of the marriage that would take place between quantum mechanics and relativity. ...He originally noticed that the equation had too many solutions... He thought the negatively charged solutions would be electrons and the positive charge solutions would be s... He realized that this made no sense and the two things had to have the same , and finally... realized that he was... predicting [the positively charged electron,] the , just shortly before the positron was... independently and serendipitously discovered."
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Paul Dirac
Paul Dirac
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Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was a British theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Dirac laid the foundations for both quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory, coining the former term. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1932 to 1969, and a professor of physics at Florida State University from 1970 t
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"My research work was based in pictures. I needed to visualise things and projective geometry was often most useful e.g. in figuring out how a particular quantity transforms under Lorentz transf[ormation]. When I came to publish the results I suppressed the projective geometry as the results could be expressed more concisely in analytic form."
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Paul DiracQuote
"When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards. Maxwell in his day got his equations, but only in an enormous mass of gear wheels and so forth."
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Paul DiracQuote
"A good deal of my research work in physics has consisted in not setting out to solve some particular problems, but simply examining mathematical quantities of a kind that physicists use and trying to get them together in an interesting way regardless of any application that the work may have. It is simply a search for pretty mathematics. It may turn out later that the work does have an application. Then one has had good luck."
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Paul DiracQuote
"Dirac, in his first paper, in contrast to what his “hole”-theory implied, had identified the positively charged particle corresponding to the electron also with the proton. However, after Weyl had pointed out that Dirac’s hole theory led to equal masses, he changed his mind and gave the new particle the same mass as the electron."
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Paul DiracQuote
"If there is no complete agreement between the results of ones work and the experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged."
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Paul Dirac