BIOGRAPHY
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac OM FRS (8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century.
Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory”. He also made significant contributions to the reconciliation of general relativity with quantum mechanics.
Dirac was regarded by his friends and colleagues as unusual in character. In a 1926 letter to Paul Ehrenfest, Albert Einstein wrote of Dirac, “I have trouble with Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful.” In another letter he wrote, “I don’t understand Dirac at all (Compton effect).”
He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a member of the Center for Theoretical Studies, University of Miami, and spent the last decade of his life at Florida State University.
EARLY YEARS
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born at his parents’ home in Bristol, England, on 8 August 1902, and grew up in the Bishopston area of the city. His father, Charles Adrien Ladislas Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice, Switzerland, who worked in Bristol as a French teacher. His mother, Florence Hannah Dirac, née Holten, the daughter of a ship’s captain, was born in Cornwall, England, and worked as a librarian at the Bristol Central Library. Paul had a younger sister, Béatrice Isabelle Marguerite, known as Betty, and an older brother, Reginald Charles Félix, known as Felix, who committed suicide in March 1925. Dirac later recalled: “My parents were terribly distressed. I didn’t know they cared so much … I never knew that parents were supposed to care for their children, but from then on I knew.”
Charles and the children were officially Swiss nationals until they became naturalised on 22 October 1919. Dirac’s father was strict and authoritarian, although he disapproved of corporal punishment. Dirac had a strained relationship with his father, so much so that after his father’s death, Dirac wrote, “I feel much freer now, and I am my own man.” Charles forced his children to speak to him only in French, so that they might learn the language. When Dirac found that he could not express what he wanted to say in French, he chose to remain silent.
EDUCATION
Dirac was educated first at Bishop Road Primary School and then at the all-boys Merchant Venturers’ Technical College (later Cotham School), where his father was a French teacher. The school was an institution attached to the University of Bristol, which shared grounds and staff. It emphasised technical subjects like bricklaying, shoemaking and metal work, and modern languages. This was unusual at a time when secondary education in Britain was still dedicated largely to the classics, and something for which Dirac would later express his gratitude.
Dirac studied electrical engineering on a City of Bristol University Scholarship at the University of Bristol’s engineering faculty, which was co-located with the Merchant Venturers’ Technical College. Shortly before he completed his degree in 1921, he sat for the entrance examination for St John’s College, Cambridge. He passed and was awarded a £70 scholarship, but this fell short of the amount of money required to live and study at Cambridge. Despite his having graduated with a first class honours Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, the economic climate of the post-war depression was such that he was unable to find work as an engineer. Instead, he took up an offer to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics at the University of Bristol free of charge. He was permitted to skip the first year of the course owing to his engineering degree.
In 1923, Dirac graduated, once again with first class honours, and received a £140 scholarship from the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Along with his £70 scholarship from St John’s College, this was enough to live at Cambridge. There, Dirac pursued his interests in the theory of general relativity, an interest he had gained earlier as a student in Bristol, and in the nascent field of quantum physics, under the supervision of Ralph Fowler. From 1925 to 1928 he held an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. He completed his PhD in June 1926 with the first thesis on quantum mechanics to be submitted anywhere. He then continued his research in Copenhagen and Göttingen.
HONOURS
Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for physics with Erwin Schrödinger “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory”. Dirac was also awarded the Royal Medal in 1939 and both the Copley Medal and the Max Planck Medal in 1952. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1930, an Honorary Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1948, and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics, London in 1971. He received the inaugural J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize in 1969. Dirac became a member of the Order of Merit in 1973, having previously turned down a knighthood as he did not want to be addressed by his first name.
DEATH
In 1984, Dirac died in Tallahassee, Florida, and was buried at Tallahassee’s Roselawn Cemetery. Dirac’s childhood home in Bishopston, Bristol is commemorated with a blue plaque, and the nearby Dirac Road is named in recognition of his links with the city of Bristol. A commemorative stone was erected in a garden in Saint-Maurice, Switzerland, the town of origin of his father’s family, on 1 August 1991. On 13 November 1995 a commemorative marker, made from Burlington green slate and inscribed with the Dirac equation, was unveiled in Westminster Abbey. The Dean of Westminster, Edward Carpenter, had initially refused permission for the memorial, thinking Dirac to be anti-Christian, but was eventually (over a five-year period) persuaded to relent.
The contents of this page are sourced from Wikipedia article on 4 July 2020. The contents are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
