P A M Dirac Quotes

#1. God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.

Paul Dirac

#2. It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.

Paul Dirac

#3. The only object of theoretical physics is to calculate results that can be compared with experiment ... it is quite unnecessary that any satisfactory description of the whole course of the phenomena should be given.

Paul Dirac

#4. People who equate all the different kinds of human activity to money are taking too primitive a view of things.

Paul A.M. Dirac

#5. Hopes are always accompanied by fears, and, in scientific research, the fears are liable to become dominant.

Paul Dirac

#6. Quantum mechanics has explained all of chemistry and most of physics.

Paul Dirac

#7. The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved.

Paul Dirac

#8. If one is working from the point of view of getting beauty into one's equation, ... one is on a sure line of progress.

Paul A.M. Dirac

#9. A termination of one's life is necessary in the scheme of things to provide a logical reason for unselfishness ... The fact that there is an end to one's life compels one to take an interest in things that will continue to live after one is dead.

Paul Dirac

#10. Living is worthwhile if one can contribute in some small way to this endless chain of progress.

Paul A.M. Dirac

#11. Theoretical physicists accept the need for mathematical beauty as an act of faith ... For example, the main reason why the theory of relativity is so universally accepted is its mathematical beauty.

Paul Dirac

#12. A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give.

Paul Dirac

#13. No. I had successfully solved the difficulty of finding a description of the electron which was consistent with both relativity and quantum mechanics. Of course, when you solve one difficulty, other new difficulties arise. You then try to sove them. You can never solve all difficulties at once.

Paul Dirac

#14. I should like to suggest to you that the cause of all the economic troubles is that we have an economic system which tries to maintain an equality of value between two things, which it would be better to recognise from the beginning as of unequal value.

Paul Dirac

#15. I think it is 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.
At age 60.

Paul Dirac

#16. Quantum field theory was originally developed for the treatment of electrodynamics, immediately after the completion of quantum mechanics and the discovery of the Dirac equation.

David Gross

#17. I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.

G.H. Hardy

#18. Dirac politely refused Robert's [Robert Oppenheimer] two proffered books: reading books, the Cambridge theoretician announced gravely, "interfered with thought."

Luis Walter Alvarez

#19. When I was a young man, Dirac was my hero. He made a breakthrough, a new method of doing physics. He had the courage to simply guess at the form of an equation, the equation we now call the Dirac equation, and to try to interpret it afterwards.

Richard P. Feynman

#20. During the meeting in Delhi with Dirac on 12 January 1955, Nehru asked him if he had any recommendations for the future of the new republic of India. After his usual reflective pause, Dirac replied: 'A common language, preferably English. Peace with Pakistan. The metric system.

Graham Farmelo

#21. I learnt to distrust all physical concepts as the basis for a theory. Instead one should put one's trust in a mathematical scheme, even if the scheme does not appear at first sight to be connected with physics. One should concentrate on getting interesting mathematics.

Paul Dirac

#22. If there is a God, he's a great mathematician.

Paul Dirac

#23. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe

Paul Dirac

#24. Well, in the first place, it leads to great anxiety as to whether it's going to be correct or not ... I expect that's the dominating feeling. It gets to be rather a fever ... At age 60, when asked about his feelings on discovering the Dirac equation.

Paul Dirac

#25. The shortage of buyers, which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as due to people not wishing to obtain possession of goods, but as people being unwilling to part with something which might earn a regular income in exchange for those goods.

Paul Dirac

#26. I am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet.

Linus Pauling

#27. I think it is the general rule that the originator of a new idea is not the most suitable person to develop it, because his fears of something going wrong are really too strong ... At age 69.

Paul Dirac

#28. As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen.

Paul Dirac

#29. There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.

Paul Dirac

#30. In his 1930 book, Dirac took for granted that measurements could be made, but was very vague about what was actually involved.

Willis Lamb