Paul Dirac

Also known as Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, Paul A M Dirac, P A M Dirac, P. A. M. Dirac

British theoretical physicist (1902–1984)

OverviewAI-generated

Paul Adrian Maurice Dirac was a mathematician and theoretical physicist who worked in quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He was educated at the University of Bristol and the University of Cambridge. His professional career included positions as a professor at the University of Cambridge, St John's College, the University of Miami, and Florida State University.

Dirac received the Nobel Prize in Physics, the Copley Medal, and the Royal Medal. He was a member of the Royal Society, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He also held the title of Fellow of the Royal Society. His doctoral advisor was Ralph H. Fowler, and his doctoral students included Homi Jehangir Bhabha, Fred Hoyle, Dennis W. Sciama, and John Polkinghorne.

Born in Bristol in 1902, Dirac died in Tallahassee in 1984. He held citizenship in the United Kingdom and Switzerland. He suffered from prosopagnosia and followed a deist worldview. His notable works include *Les principes de la mécanique quantique* and *From a life of physics*.

Synthesized by Vinony from 43 facts across 8 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, Open Library, MusicBrainz, Last.fm, Nobel Prize, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born: 1902
Died: 1984
Works: 29

Top works

Les principes de la mécanique quantique
From a life of physics
Kvantovaja teorija
QUANTISED SINGULARITIES IN THE ELECTROMAGNETIC FIELD. In Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A. Volume 133. 1931. pp. 60-72.
THE QUANTUM THEORY OF THE EMISSION AND ABSORPTION OF RADIATION. Proceedings of the Royal Society. Series A. Vol. 114. No. A 767 pp. 243-265. THE QUANTUM THEORY OF DISPERSION. Proceedings of the Royal Society. Series A. Vol. 114. No. A 769. pp. 710-728. Two Papers.

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Person
Gender: Male
Origin: Austria
Active from: 1902
Active to: 1984

Official site Discogs

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 116
Total plays: 234

Similar artists

The Ballad Of You And MeFatbwoiJohannes Lauxen

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Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Nonparametric Estimation from Incomplete Observations
· 1958 · cited 70,816x
“Mini-mental state”
· 1975 · cited 68,275x
Research electronic data capture (REDCap)—A metadata-driven methodology and workflow process for providing translational research informatics support
· 2009 · cited 46,809x
Cytoscape: A Software Environment for Integrated Models of Biomolecular Interaction Networks
· 2003 · cited 45,735x
SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python
· 2020 · cited 36,494x

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Quotes

“The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.”
“One possibility in this direction is to regard, classically, an electron as the end of a single Faraday line of force. The electric field in this picture from discrete Faraday lines of force, which are to be treated as physical things, like strings. One has then to develop a dynamics for such a string like structure, and quantize it.... In such a theory a bare electron would be inconceivable, since one cannot imagine the end of a piece of string without having the string.”
“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in the case of poetry, it's the exact opposite!”
“With my assumption... life need never end. There is no decisive argument for deciding between [certain] assumptions. I prefer the one that allows the possibility of endless life. One may hope that some day the question will be decided by direct observation.”
“It was a good description to say that it was a game, a very interesting game one could play. Whenever one solved one of the little problems, one could write a paper about it. It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since then.”
“I don't suppose that applies so much to other physicists; I think it’s a peculiarity of myself that I like to play about with equations, just looking for beautiful mathematical relations which maybe don’t have any physical meaning at all. Sometimes they do.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize in Physics1933
“for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory”
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~37 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (/dɪ.ˈræk/, dih-RAK; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was a British theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Dirac laid the foundations for both quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory, coining the former term. He was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1932 to 1969, and a professor of physics at Florida State University from 1970 to 1984. Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory."

Dirac graduated from the University of Bristol with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 1921, and a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics in 1923. Dirac then graduated from St John's College, Cambridge, with a Doctor of Philosophy in Physics in 1926, writing the first ever thesis on quantum mechanics.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Paul Dirac” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.