Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac: Reminiscences about a Great Physicist by Behram N. Kursunoglu (PDF)

Description

In this memorial volume, twenty-four of Dirac’s closest friends, colleagues and contemporaries remember him with affection. Dirac, who died in 1984, was unquestionably one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century. The book describes his human side, with many anecdotes about the man with a reputation for silence. His immense influence on modern physics is surveyed in chapters written by eminent scientists. Dirac was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933 at the age of thiry-one. His tremendous contributions to the field included his prediction of the magnetic moment and antiparticles as well as the spin of the electron. His formulations of the quantum field theory, statistics of particles and fields, his work on gravitational waves, and his prediction of magnetic monopoles stand as monuments to his originality and deep understanding of natural phenomena. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the development of quantum theory or in Paul Dirac.

User’s Reviews

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⭐Upon reading Kragh’s biography of Dirac, I needed to revisit other Dirac books. Allow me to list those books: The Development of Quantum Theory (Dirac, 1971), Aspects of Quantum Theory (Salam & Wigner, 1972), Paul Dirac, The Man and His Work (Goddard, 1998). Those three books, plus the book under review, serve as supplement to Kragh’s scientific biography. Let us read from reminiscences:(1) Willis Lamb, Schrodinger’s Cat: “Density Matrices, which play a … role in… this discussion, were independently invented by Landau, Von Neumann, and Dirac.” (page 251).(2) Abdus Salam, Dirac and Finite Field Theories: “Dirac thought his greatest contribution to physics would be the Poisson Bracket.” (page 268 ).(3) Joseph Weber, Weak and Gravitational Radiation Interactions: “Dirac had great interest in the development of gravitational radiation antennas and gave us strong encouragement.” (page 245, this was 1962).(4) Polkinghorne, At the Feet of Dirac: “Dirac was astonishingly uninterested in the great unresolved interpretative issue of the act of measurement…” (page 228 ).(5) Matthews, Dirac and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics: ” In ‘hole theory,’ Dirac’s amazingly confident physical intuition led him marginally astray.” (page 221 ).(6) Hoyle, Magnetic Monopoles and the Halos of Galaxies: “Dirac began his investigation of magnetic monopoles with the hope of deducing the fine-structure-constant.” (page 175 ).(7) Marciano & Goldhaber, Magnetic Monopoles and the Fine Structure Constant: “Dirac’s magnetic monopole has inspired the creative imaginations of several generations of physicists.” (page 172 ).(8) Brown and Rechenberg, Dirac and Heisenberg: ” At first, Dirac hesitated to accept Schrodinger’s wave mechanics.” (page 122).(9) Pais, Playing With Equations: “Dirac proposed a many-time formalism of quantum electrodynamics, in which the individual time is assigned to each electron… this new theory marks an important first step toward the manifestly covariant procedures.” (page 105 ).(10) Dalitz, Another Side to Paul Dirac: “We see Dirac deeply involved with approximate calculations whose only purpose was to obtain an answer which the experimenters could rely upon for building large and significant projects.”(11) Initial seventy pages of this memorial volume are personal in nature: the human side. Following which, one- hundred pages entitled “More Scientific Ideas.” Final chapters (fifty pages) refer to “Influences and Inspirations.”Concluding, wisdom attributed to Paul Dirac: “One must not judge a man’s worth from his poorer work; one must always judge him by the best he has done.” (page 269 ).

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