Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac :: essays research papers

"Physical Laws should have mathematical beauty." This statement was Dirac's response to the question of his philosophy of physics, posed to him in Moscow in 1955. He wrote it on a blackboard that is still preserved today.[1] Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-1984), known as P. A. M. Dirac, was the fifteenth Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933 with Erwin Schrodinger.[2] He is considered to be the founder of quantum mechanics, providing the transition from quantum theory. The Cambridge Philosophical Society awarded him the Hopkins Medal in 1930. He was awarded the Royal Medal by the Royal Society of London in 1939 and the James Scott Prize from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 1952 the Max Plank Medal came from the Association of German Physical Societies, as well as the Copley Medal from the Royal Society. The Akademie der Wissenschaften in the German Democratic Republic presented him with the Helmholtz Medal in 1964. In 1969 he received the Oppenheimer Prize from the University of Miami. Lastly in 1973, he received the Order of Merit.[3] Dirac was well known for his almost anti--social behavior, but he was a member of many scientific organizations throughout the world. Naturally, he was a member of the Royal Society, but he was also a member of the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforsher and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He was a foreign member of Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques and the Academie des Sciences, the Accademia delle Scienze Torino and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and the National Academy of Science. He was an honorary member and fellow of the Indian Academy of Science, the Chinese Physical Society, the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the National Institute of Sciences in India, the American Physical Society, the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in India, the Royal Danish Academy, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.[4] The world wide respect he earned for his work was well deserved. A prolific writer, Dirac published over two hundred works between 1924 and 1987, mainly papers in physics journals on topics relating to quantum mechanics. His book Principles of Quantum Mechanics , published in 1930, was the first textbook in the discipline and became the standard.[5] Some predictions made by Dirac are still untested because his theoretical work was so far reaching, but many other predictions have been verified, assuring him of a special place in the history of physics.[6] Dirac was three years old when Einstein published his famous papers on