Dirac

Biography

Dirac was born in Bristol, Gloucestershire, England. In 1926 he developed a version of quantum mechanics, which included “Matrix Mechanics” and “Wave Mechanics” as special cases.

In 1928, building on Pauli's work on nonrelativistic spin systems, he derived the Dirac equation, a relativistic equation describing the electron. This allowed Dirac to formulate the Dirac sea and predict the existence of the positron, the electron's anti-particle; the positron was subsequently observed by Anderson in 1932. Dirac explained the origin of quantum spin as a relativistic phenomenon.

Dirac's Principles of Quantum Mechanics, published in 1930, pioneered the use of linear operators as a generalization of the theories of Heisenberg and Schrödinger. It also introduced the bra-ket notation, in which |ψ>, ket, denotes a state vector in the Hilbert space of a system and <ψ|, bra, its dual vector. <ψ|ψ> denotes an inner product. Dirac also introduced Dirac's delta function.

Dirac shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory". Dirac was Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge from 1932 to 1969 and an undergraduate at Bristol University. The Dirac Prize is awarded in his honour.

Dirac spent his last years at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. The Physics Department awards the Dirac-Hellmann award. The Dirac-Hellman Award was endowed by Dr. Bruce Hellman (Dirac's last Ph.D. student) in 1997 to reward outstanding work in theoretical physics by FSU researchers.

Dirac died in Tallahassee, Florida.

Views

Dirac was a committed atheist. After being asked about his thoughts on Dirac's views, Pauli remarked "If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet".

See also

Main Dirac sea Dirac equation Dirac delta function Dirac Prize Fermi-Dirac statistics Physics Aharonov-Bohm effect Antiparticle Fermi energy Magnetic monopole Nobel Prize in Physics Quantum state Quantum field theory Quantum harmonic oscillator Quantum mechanics Perturbation theory Planck's constant Schrödinger equation Spin Spinor Math Bra-ket notation Complete Fermi-Dirac integral Degenerate distribution Formal system Incomplete Fermi-Dirac integral Lucasian professor

People Behram Kursunoglu Erwin Schrödinger Eugene Wigner Harish-Chandra John Lennard-Jones Wolfgang Pauli Robert S. Mulliken Mahmoud Hessaby Other Copley Medal Communes of the Charente département WATOC Lists Timeline of cosmology Timeline of mechanics and physics List of physics topics List of English people List of astronomical topics List of mathematical topics List of physicists

External Links

• Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics
• Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac Biography
• Dirac Medal of the World Association of Theoretically Oriented Chemists (WATOC)

Referenced By