Paul Dirac

Today is the birthday of Paul Dirac, who was born in 1902 in Bristol, England. Dirac studied engineering at Bristol University and then, thanks to scholarships, mathematics and physics at Cambridge University. For his PhD thesis, Dirac developed a form of Erwin Schrödinger’s wave equation that is consistent with Albert Einstein’s special relativity. Among the equation’s implications is the existence of antimatter, which was identified in 1932 by Carl Anderson soon after Dirac’s prediction. Dirac’s work 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.”

Date in History: 8 August 1902