Just so you dont miss, the brilliant and enigmatic Paul Dirac, a pioneer of quantum mechanics, was born 112 years ago today. An excerpt from Physics Today on this birthday is as follows - Dirac studied engineering at Bristol University and then, thanks to scholarships, mathematics and physics at Cambridge University. For his PhD thesis, he developed a form of Erwin Schrodingers wave equation that is consistent with Albert Einsteins special relativity. Among the equations implications is the existence of antimatter, which was identified in 1932 by Carl Anderson soon after Diracs prediction. Diracs quantization of the electromagnetic field as a collection of harmonic oscillators amid particles that can be created and annihilated was the first step toward quantum electrodynamics and, more generally, toward quantum field theories. In an essay published two years before he died in 1984, Dirac recounted his approach to theoretical physics: 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. ~ TDK
Posted on: Fri, 08 Aug 2014 17:49:44 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015