Quotes About Dirac

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

Willis Lamb

#2. 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

#3. Dirac found that the ratio of the electric force to the gravitational force of an electron-proton pair is roughly equal to the ratio of the age of the universe to the time it takes light to traverse an atom.

Michael Flynn

#4. It also predicted that the electron should have a partner: an antielectron, or positron. The discovery of the positron in 1932 confirmed Dirac's theory and led to his being awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1933.

Stephen Hawking

#5. God does not exist and Dirac is His prophet.

Wolfgang Paul

#6. 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

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

Luis Walter Alvarez

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

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

Paul Dirac

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

Paul Dirac

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

Paul A.M. Dirac

#15. 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

#16. A theory with mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct than an ugly one that fits some experimental data.

Paul Dirac

#17. Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.

Paul Dirac

#18. The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.

Paul Dirac

#19. I admired Bohr very much. We had long talks together, long talks in which Bohr did practically all the talking.

Paul Dirac

#20. A book on the new physics, if not purely descriptive of experimental work, must essentially be mathematical.

Paul Dirac

#21. 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 poetry, it's the exact opposite.

Paul A.M. Dirac

#22. Scientific progress is measured in units of courage, not intelligence.

Paul Dirac

#23. The successful development of science requires a proper balance to be maintained between the method of building up from observations and the method of deducing by pure reasoning from speculative assumptions.

Paul A.M. Dirac

#24. The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.

Paul A.M. Dirac

#25. I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.

Paul Dirac

#26. I consider that I understand an equation when I can predict the properties of its solutions, without actually solving it.

Paul Dirac

#27. The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.

Paul A.M. Dirac

#28. Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.

Paul A.M. Dirac

#29. There are always more people who prefer to speak than to listen.

Paul Dirac

#30. If we are honest - and scientists have to be - we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality.

Paul Dirac

#31. 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

#32. It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.

Paul Dirac

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. 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

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

Paul Dirac

#39. 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

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

Paul Dirac

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

Paul Dirac

#42. 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

#43. 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

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

Paul Dirac

#45. 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

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

Paul A.M. Dirac

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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