86 Facts About Paul Dirac

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was an English mathematical and theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics.

Paul Dirac was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and a professor of physics at Florida State University.

Paul Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrodinger for "the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory".

Paul Dirac graduated from the University of Bristol with a first class honours Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1921, and a first class honours Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics in 1923.

Paul Dirac then graduated from the University of Cambridge with a PhD in physics in 1926, writing the first ever thesis on quantum mechanics.

Paul Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics, coining the latter term.

Paul Dirac wrote a famous paper in 1931, which further predicted the existence of antimatter.

Paul Dirac contributed greatly to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics.

Paul Dirac contributed to Fermi-Dirac statistics, which describes the behaviour of fermions, particles with half-integer spin.

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born at his parents' home in Bristol, England, on 8 August 1902, and grew up in the Bishopston area of the city.

Paul Dirac's father, Charles Adrien Ladislas Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice, Switzerland, of French descent, who worked in Bristol as a French teacher.

Paul Dirac's mother, Florence Hannah Dirac, nee Holten, was born to a Cornish Methodist family in Liskeard, Cornwall.

Paul Dirac was named after Florence Nightingale by her father, a ship's captain, who had met Nightingale while he was a soldier during the Crimean War.

Paul Dirac's mother moved to Bristol as a young woman, where she worked as a librarian at the Bristol Central Library; despite this she still considered her identity to be Cornish rather than English.

Paul Dirac had a younger sister, Beatrice Isabelle Marguerite, known as Betty, and an older brother, Reginald Charles Felix, known as Felix, who died by suicide in March 1925.

Paul Dirac's father was strict and authoritarian, although he disapproved of corporal punishment.

When Paul Dirac found that he could not express what he wanted to say in French, he chose to remain silent.

Paul Dirac was educated first at Bishop Road Primary School and then at the all-boys Merchant Venturers' Technical College, where his father was a French teacher.

Paul Dirac studied electrical engineering on a City of Bristol University Scholarship at the University of Bristol's engineering faculty, which was co-located with the Merchant Venturers' Technical College.

Paul Dirac was permitted to skip the first year of the course owing to his engineering degree.

Under the influence of Peter Fraser, whom Paul Dirac called the best mathematics teacher, he had the most interest in projective geometry, and began applying it to the geometrical version of relativity Minkowski developed.

Paul Dirac completed his PhD in June 1926 with the first thesis on quantum mechanics to be submitted anywhere.

Paul Dirac then continued his research in Copenhagen and Gottingen.

In 1937, Paul Dirac married Margit Wigner, a sister of physicist Eugene Wigner and a divorcee.

Paul Dirac raised Margit's two children, Judith and Gabriel, as if they were his own.

Paul and Margit Dirac had two daughters together, Mary Elizabeth and Florence Monica.

Paul Dirac was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character.

Paul Dirac himself wrote in his diary during his postgraduate years that he concentrated solely on his research, and stopped only on Sunday when he took long strolls alone.

An anecdote recounted in a review of the 2009 biography tells of Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac sailing on an ocean liner to a conference in Japan in August 1929.

Paul Dirac called the equation for the time evolution of a quantum-mechanical operator, which he was the first to write down, the "Heisenberg equation of motion".

Paul Dirac referred to the latter as "Bose statistics" for reasons, he explained, of "symmetry".

Paul Dirac was famously not bothered by issues of interpretation in quantum theory.

Paul Dirac's contribution was a criticism of the political purpose of religion, which Bohr regarded as quite lucid when hearing it from Heisenberg later.

In 1971, at a conference meeting, Paul Dirac expressed his views on the existence of God.

Paul Dirac explained that the existence of God could be justified only if an improbable event were to have taken place in the past:.

Paul Dirac did not commit himself to any definite view, but he described the possibilities for scientifically answering the question of God.

Paul Dirac discovered the relativistic equation for the electron, which now bears his name.

Paul Dirac is credited as being the one to create quantum field theory, which underlies all theoretical work on sub-atomic or "elementary" particles today, work that is fundamental to our understanding of the forces of nature, alongside creating quantum electrodynamics and coining the term.

Paul Dirac proposed and investigated the concept of a magnetic monopole, an object not yet known empirically, as a means of bringing even greater symmetry to James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism.

Paul Dirac coined the terms "fermion" and "boson".

Therefore, Paul Dirac was known for his "astounding physical intuition combined with the ability to invent new mathematics to create new physics".

Fowler sent Heisenberg's paper on to Paul Dirac, who was on vacation in Bristol, asking him to look into this paper carefully.

Paul Dirac's attention was drawn to a mysterious mathematical relationship, at first sight unintelligible, that Heisenberg had established.

Several weeks later, back in Cambridge, Paul Dirac suddenly recognised that this mathematical form had the same structure as the Poisson brackets that occur in the classical dynamics of particle motion.

Shortly after Wolfgang Pauli proposed his Pauli exclusion principle, Enrico Fermi and Dirac both realized the principle would dramatically alter the statistical mechanics of electron systems.

Paul Dirac's equation contributed to explaining the origin of quantum spin as a relativistic phenomenon.

Paul Dirac is regarded as the founder of quantum electrodynamics, being the first to use that term.

Paul Dirac introduced the idea of vacuum polarisation in the early 1930s.

Paul Dirac's The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, published in 1930, is a landmark in the history of science.

In that book, Paul Dirac incorporated the previous work of Werner Heisenberg on matrix mechanics and of Erwin Schrodinger on wave mechanics into a single mathematical formalism that associates measurable quantities to operators acting on the Hilbert space of vectors that describe the state of a physical system.

In 1931, Paul Dirac proposed that the existence of a single magnetic monopole in the universe would suffice to explain the quantisation of electrical charge.

Paul Dirac contributed to the Tube Alloys project, the British programme to research and construct atomic bombs during World War II.

Paul Dirac made fundamental contributions to the process of uranium enrichment and the gas centrifuge, and whose work was deemed to be "probably the most important theoretical result in centrifuge technology".

Paul Dirac's work laid the foundations for canonical quantum gravity.

Paul Dirac predicted gravitational waves would have well defined energy density in 1964.

Paul Dirac reintroduced the term "graviton" in a number of lectures in 1959, noting that the energy of the gravitational field should come in quanta.

Paul Dirac contributed to cosmology, putting forth his large numbers hypothesis.

Paul Dirac developed a general theory of the quantum field with dynamical constraints, which forms the basis of the gauge theories and superstring theories of today.

Paul Dirac wrote an influential paper in 1933 regarding the Lagrangian in quantum mechanics.

The paper contains the mathematics of combining special relativity with the quantum mechanics of quarks inside hadrons, and lays the foundations of two-mode squeezed states that are essential to modern quantum optics, though Paul Dirac did not realize it at the time.

Paul Dirac previously worked on AdS during the 1930s, publishing a paper in 1935.

Remarkably, in a letter to Niels Bohr in February 1927, Paul Dirac had come to the same calculation, but he did not publish it.

Paul Dirac was the one to initiate the development of time-dependent perturbation theory in his early work on semi-classical atoms interacting with an electromagnetic field.

Paul Dirac was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1932 to 1969.

Paul Dirac conceived the Helikon vortex isotope separation process in 1934.

Paul Dirac introduced the separative work unit in 1941.

Paul Dirac contributed to the Tube Alloys project, the British programme to research and construct atomic bombs during World War II.

In 1969, Paul Dirac was forced to retire from his chair at Cambridge, due to his age.

Paul Dirac accepted a position at FSU as a full professor in 1972.

Paul Dirac would walk about a mile to work each day and was fond of swimming in one of the two nearby lakes, and was more sociable than he had been at the University of Cambridge, where he mostly worked at home apart from giving classes and seminars.

Paul Dirac published over 60 papers at FSU during those last twelve years of his life, including a short book on general relativity.

In 1975, Paul Dirac gave a series of five lectures at the University of New South Wales which were subsequently published as a book, Directions in Physics.

Paul Dirac donated the royalties from this book to the university for the establishment of Dirac Lecture Series.

Paul Dirac strode to a blackboard and wrote that the laws of nature should be expressed in beautiful equations.

In 1984, Paul Dirac died in Tallahassee, Florida, and was buried at Tallahassee's Roselawn Cemetery.

On 13 November 1995 a commemorative marker, made from Burlington green slate and inscribed with the Paul Dirac equation, was unveiled in Westminster Abbey.

The Dean of Westminster, Edward Carpenter, initially refused permission for the memorial, thinking Paul Dirac to be anti-Christian, but was eventually persuaded to relent.

Paul Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for physics with Erwin Schrodinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory".

Paul Dirac was the youngest ever theoretician to win the prize, at the age of 31, until T D Lee in 1957.

Paul Dirac was awarded the Royal Medal in 1939 and both the Copley Medal and the Max Planck Medal in 1952.

Paul Dirac was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1930, a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1938, an Honorary Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1948, a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1949, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1950, and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics, London in 1971.

Paul Dirac received the inaugural J Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize in 1969.

Paul Dirac became a member of the Order of Merit in 1973, having previously turned down a knighthood as he did not want to be addressed by his first name.

The Paul AM Dirac Science Library at Florida State University, which Manci opened in December 1989, is named in his honour, and his papers are held there.

The Distributed Research utilising Advanced Computing and Paul Dirac software are named in his honour.

Paul Dirac is widely considered to be on par with Sir Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Einstein.