Search results
Paul Dirac was an English theoretical physicist who co-founded quantum mechanics and predicted antimatter. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 and made many contributions to cosmology, string theory, and atomic bombs.
Aug 7, 2024 · Learn about Dirac's life, achievements, and contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Find out how he developed the relativistic wave equation for the electron and predicted the existence of antiparticles.
- Alexei Kojevnikov
- Early Days
- The Dirac Equation
- Other Achievements
- Dirac Stories
When Dirac went to Cambridge in 1923, the physics of matter on the smallest scales – in those days this was the physics of the atom – was in ferment. It had been known for more than a decade that the old mechanics of Newton – “classical” mechanics, as it came to be called – does not apply in the microscopic world. In particular, evidence from the l...
Although brilliant – in Einstein’s words, “the most logically perfect presentation of quantum mechanics” – this was a reformulation of physics that had, admittedly only just, been discovered. Dirac’s main contribution came several years later, when (still in his mid-twenties) he made his most spectacular discovery. Before quantum mechanics, there h...
Having explained spin, it was natural for Dirac to try to explain electric charge, and in particular the mysterious fact that it is quantized: all charges found in nature are multiples of the charge on the electron. In classical electricity, there is no basis for this: charges can have any value. In 1931 Dirac gave a solution of this problem in an ...
It is not my intention to write about what sort of person Dirac was. But I must mention the genre of “Dirac stories”. He was so unusual in the logic and precision of his interaction with the world, both in and out of physics, that tales have become attached to him and have acquired a life of their own. I suppose it matters to a historian whether th...
Oct 2, 2009 · Up next, the strangest physicist you probably never heard of. At age 31 in 1933, Paul Dirac won the Nobel Prize. And at the time, he was the youngest person ever to receive that honor. His work...
Aug 5, 2023 · Learn how the British physicist Paul Dirac formulated the Dirac equation in 1927, a relativistic equation that described an electron's spin and revealed the existence of antimatter. The article also explores Dirac's unusual methods, character and contributions to quantum physics.
- Marcus Chown
Learn about Paul Dirac, one of the greatest theoretical physicists in history, who reshaped quantum mechanics with the Dirac Equation and founded quantum electrodynamics. Discover his life, achievements, challenges and legacy in this comprehensive biography.
People also ask
Where did Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac live?
Who was Paul Dirac?
What was the last thing Paul Dirac was working on?
How did Paul Dirac change quantum mechanics?
Paul Dirac was a British theoretical physicist who developed the relativistic theory of the electron and the theory of holes. He also reconciled quantum mechanics and relativity theory with his famous wave equation.
Related searches
