Quotes About Dirac

Paul Dirac was notoriously a man of few words. Dick Feynman told the story that when he first met Dirac at a conference, Dirac said after a long silence, "I have an equation; do you have one too?

I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet.

It also predicted that the electron should have a partner: an antielectron, or positron. The discovery of the positron in 1932 confirmed Dirac's theory and led to his being awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1933.

Dirac's equation not only accounted for the spin of the electron and its observed magnetic moment, but also correctly explained the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. If the derivation of the Sommerfeld-like formula for the spectrum of the hydrogen atom was one of the striking successes of the Dirac equation, some of its other features were very troublesome.

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.

This is Dirac's quantum mechanics: a recipe for calculating the spectra of the variables, and a recipe for calculating the probability that one or another value in the spectrum appears during an interaction.

Dirac's quantum mechanics thus allows us to do two things. First, to calculate which values a physical variable may assume. This is called "calculation of the spectrum of a variable"; it captures the granular nature of things.

Loop theory describes this atomic and granular quantum structure of space in a precise mathematical form. It is obtained by applying the general equations of quantum mechanics written by Dirac to Einstein's gravitational field. In particular, loop theory specifies that volume (for example the volume of a given cube) cannot be arbitrarily small. A minimum volume exists. No space smaller than this minimum volume exists. There is a minimum "quantum" of volume: an elementary atom of space.

During the meeting in Delhi with Dirac on 12 January 1955, Nehru asked him if he had any recommendations for the future of the new republic of India. After his usual reflective pause, Dirac replied: 'A common language, preferably English. Peace with Pakistan. The metric system.

Dirac said nothing to his fellow pedestrians, but Kierkegaard would startle some of them by interrogating them about some subject on his mind, following in the tradition of Socrates, whom he called 'the virtuoso of the casual encounter'.

I would say the first three or four papers on nano-thermoelectricity in bismuth went almost unnoticed, but all of a sudden when Dirac cones came along - pop! - there was huge interest in bismuth-related materials.

Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory with those of the quantum theory. The extraordinary advances made in this field by Dirac ... leave open the question whether it will be possible to satisfy the claims of the two theories without at the same time determining the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant.

Our friend Dirac has a creed; and the main tenet of that creed is: There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.

Dirac found that the ratio of the electric force to the gravitational force of an electron-proton pair is roughly equal to the ratio of the age of the universe to the time it takes light to traverse an atom.

The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.

It seems clear that the present quantum mechanics is not in its final form. Some further changes will be needed, just about as drastic as the changes made in passing from Bohr's orbit theory to quantum mechanics. Some day a new quantum mechanics, a relativistic one, will be discovered, in which we will not have these infinities occurring at all. It might very well be that the new quantum mechanics will have determinism in the way that Einstein wanted.

The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a larger part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known.