Paul Dirac

Paul Dirac was one of the small group of physicists who built quantum mechanics in the 1920s, working alongside Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, Max Born and Niels Bohr. From his desk at Cambridge he gave the young theory a clean and general mathematical structure, one that absorbed the rival formulations of the day into a single framework. His 1930 book, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics, became the standard text on the subject and shaped how generations of physicists first learned it. What set Dirac apart was the way he reasoned, starting from abstract mathematics and trusting it to lead him toward the physics. He often argued that a researcher should look for equations with real mathematical beauty, confident that nature tends to favour elegant structures, and that conviction guided almost everything he did. The results he reached this way were sometimes so far ahead of the experiments of his time that physicists spent the following decades catching up. He held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge, the chair once occupied by Isaac Newton and later by Stephen Hawking, a measure of the regard in which he was held. Paul Dirac came to that position young and kept it for…