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Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac OM FRS [6] ( / dɪˈræk /; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English mathematical and theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. [7] [8] He is credited with laying the foundations of quantum field theory.
Biographical. P aul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on 8th August, 1902, at Bristol, England, his father being Swiss and his mother English. He was educated at the Merchant Venturer’s Secondary School, Bristol, then went on to Bristol University.
Apr 24, 2024 · P.A.M. Dirac was an English theoretical physicist who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Dirac is most famous for his 1928 relativistic quantum theory of the electron and his prediction of the existence of antiparticles. In 1933 he shared the Nobel Prize for.
- Alexei Kojevnikov
- Dirac Gives Birth to Quantum Electrodynamics
- The Dirac Equation
- The Dirac Equation Predicts Antimatter
- Magnetic Monopoles
- The Vacuum Awash with Particles
- The Lagrangian
- Renormalization
- String Theory
- GeneratedCaptionsTabForHeroSec
Quantum electrodynamics – often abbreviated to QED – describes the quantum interaction of light and matter. Dirac launched QED with his 1927 paper The Quantum Theory of the Emission and Absorption of Radiation. His new theory unified the previously separate phenomena of the light-wave and the light-quantum. It was the first theory that dealt succes...
Back in Cambridge, in October 1927, Dirac focused hard on electron behavior. Heisenberg and Schrödinger’s quantum mechanics worked perfectly well for slow moving electrons, but failed for electrons traveling at substantial fractions of the speed of light. Dirac now sought to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein’s special theory of relativity to ...
Dirac and others were perplexed by one aspect of his new equation – it produced double the expected number of electron states. At first, Dirac dismissed this absurd looking result: In May 1931, with other options exhausted, Dirac foretold the existence of antimatter. His paper was published in September 1931. In 1932, Carl Anderson at the Californi...
Early in 1931, Dirac produced a startling new theory. He began by asking: why is electric charge quantized? In other words, why is electric charge always packaged in quantities equal to integer multiples of the charge found on the electron and the proton? However, never in history had a magnetic pole been seen in isolation. North poles were always ...
The 7th Solvay Conference of 1933 brought together the world’s greatest physicists and chemists. Dirac told his audience they needed to change their conception of the vacuum: it could no longer be considered as empty. The vacuum was actually awash with particle-antiparticle pairs being created and annihilated too quickly to be detected directly.
In 1932, Dirac published The Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics in the obscure journal Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion. Until then, quantum mechanics had been developed using the Hamiltonian theory of classical dynamics. Dirac, however, believed the Lagrangiantheory was a more fundamental approach. He made good progress, showing how the Lagr...
Dirac founded quantum electrodynamics in 1927, but by the 1940s, QED was in crisis. Carrying out successive QED calculations, hoping for an ever more accurate answer, led to the opposite – terms in equations would diverge and become infinite. In 1947, Willis Lamb carried out an experiment on hydrogen gas and discovered the Lamb Shift. The Lamb Shif...
In 1955, Dirac proposed that particles such as electrons are in fact one-dimensional strings. This enabled him to dispense with concepts he found objectionable in QED – namely: 1. the ‘bare’ electron that existed separately from its own field 2. the infinities caused by the ‘bare’ electron that required renormalization Dirac’s gauge-invariant theor...
Learn about the life and achievements of Paul Dirac, one of the greatest theoretical physicists in history. Discover how he reshaped quantum mechanics, predicted antimatter, and invented quantum electrodynamics.
Quick Info. Born. 8 August 1902. Bristol, England. Died. 20 October 1984. Tallahassee, Florida, USA. Summary. Paul Dirac is famous as the creator of the complete theoretical formulation of quantum mechanics. View ten larger pictures. Biography. Paul Dirac's father was Charles Adrien Ladislas Dirac and his mother was Florence Hannah Holten.
Oct 2, 2009 · Books. Physicist Paul Dirac Is 'The Strangest Man' October 2, 20091:00 PM ET. Heard on Talk of the Nation. 24-Minute Listen. Playlist. In a new biography, Graham Farmelo digs deep into the...
Dec 22, 2017 · Learn about the life and achievements of Paul Dirac, the English theoretical physicist who made major contributions to quantum mechanics and won the Nobel Prize for his work. Find out how he predicted the existence of antimatter and developed the Dirac equation and notation.
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