Setting: August 1929: two noble prize winner physicists were travelling to Japan in a ship in order to attend a conference. Both were unmarried and in their 20s. Person 1 to person 2: Why are you dancing ? (incidentally person 2 was surrounded with beautiful girls). Person 2 to person 1: When there are nice girls it is a pleasure ! Person 1: Pondered for a while and asked person 2 : How do you know beforehand that the girls are nice? Person 1 was Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (popularly known as Paul Dirac), At that time he was a Prof. of Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. Being an Edwardian geek, he used to miserably fail when it came to give small talks or socializing. He was known among his colleagues as a very precise and taciturn guy. In fact, his colleagues coined a physical unit as dirac, which they used to define as one word/hour. Dirac while solving a quantum equation came up with two solutions, the negative solution resembled electron and he could not associate the positive solution to any the then known particle. He hypothesized nature manifests itself in a simple way. If one particle exists, there must be somewhere the other particle is lying hidden, waiting to be discovered. Subsequently, two American physicists (Davisson and Germer) experimentally verified the existence of that unknown particle, which later became to be known as positron. Person 2 was German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg. He was popularly known as ladies man and was instrumental in discovering one very important phenomenon in quantum physics (Heisenbergs uncertainty principle. In simple terms it means that in the quantum world one can either precisely determine the position of a particle or measure its momentum and not both simultaneously).
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 22:58:10 +0000