Paul Dirac
AKA
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
Born:
8-Aug
-
1902
Birthplace:
Bristol, Gloucestershire, England
Died:
20-Oct
-
1984
Location of death:
Tallahassee, FL
Cause of death:
unspecified
Remains:
Buried, Roselawn Cemetery, Tallahassee, FL
Gender:
Male
Religion:
Atheist
Race or Ethnicity:
White
Sexual orientation:
Straight
Occupation:
Physicist
Nationality:
England
Executive summary:
The Principles of Quantum Mechanics
While studying physics at Cambridge, Paul Dirac was asked to read an unpublished paper by
Werner Heisenberg
and he was struck by the potentials of the uncertainty principle. He had eleven papers published in scientific journals before earning his doctorate, including a 1925 work that established the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics and brought together the seemingly disparate concepts of Heisenberg and
Erwin Schr?dinger
.
His 1928 Dirac wave equation predicted the existence of antimatter, but was met with skepticism, as it required the existence of an unknown kind of particle with the same mass and opposite charge to an electron. This particle, the positron, was discovered by physicist
Carl David Anderson
in 1932, and Schr?dinger and Dirac shared the next year's Nobel Prize (Anderson received his Nobel laurels in 1936). Dirac also developed the
Fermi
-Dirac statistics, and conducted research on the d-function, fundamental length, and the theoretical magnetic monopole. He briefly worked under
Niels Bohr
at Copenhagen, and his students included
Fred Hoyle
. His 1933 paper on Lagrangian quantum mechanics was integral to
Richard Feynman
's later work.
His childhood was bleak, with a father who would now be deemed psychologically abusive, and an older brother who committed suicide while Dirac was in graduate school. Dirac spoke English, French, German and Russian, but not much -- he was famously disinterested in small talk or social niceties, and beyond his brilliant scientific lectures he rarely conversed at length on any topic. His wife Magrit was the sister of Hungarian Nobel physicist
Eugene Wigner
, and her son (Dirac's adopted stepson) was the mathematician Gabriel Andrew Dirac (1925-84).
Father:
Charles Adrien Ladislas Dirac (French language teacher, b. 1866, d. 1936)
Mother:
Florence Hannah Holten Dirac (librarian, b. 1878, m. 1899, d. 1941)
Brother:
Reginald Charles Felix Dirac (older, d. suicide)
Sister:
Beatrice Isabelle Marguerite Walla Dirac (?Betty?, younger)
Wife:
Margit Wigner Balasz ("Manci", sister of
Eugene Wigner
, m. Jan-1937, d. 9-Jul-2002)
Son:
Gabriel Andrew Dirac (mathematician, stepson, b. 1925, d. 1984)
Daughter:
Judith Dirac Thompson (stepdaughter, b. 1927, d. 1968)
Daughter:
Mary Dirac Colleraine Tilley (b. 1940, d. 2007)
Daughter:
Monica Dirac Parker
High School: Merchant Venturers' Secondary School, Bristol, England (1918)
University:
BS Electrical Engineering, University of Bristol (1921)
University:
MS Mathematics, University of Bristol (1923)
University:
PhD Physics, Cambridge University (1926)
Scholar:
University of Copenhagen (1926-27)
Professor:
University of Göttingen (1927)
Professor:
Fellow, University of Cambridge (1927-32)
Professor:
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, University of Cambridge (1932-59)
Professor: University of Miami Florida (1969-71)
Professor:
Florida State University (1969-84)
Nobel Prize for Physics
1933 (with
Erwin Schr?dinger
)
Royal Medal
1939
Copley Medal
1952
Max Planck Medal
1952
Order of Merit
1973
Royal Society
(1930)
Russian Academy of Sciences
Foreign Member (1931)
Indian Academy of Sciences
Foreign Member (1939)
Chinese Physical Society
Foreign Member (1943)
Royal Irish Academy
Foreign Member (1944)
Royal Society of Edinburgh
Foreign Member (1946)
Institut de France
Foreign Member (1946)
National Institute of Sciences of India
Foreign Member (1947)
American Physical Society
Foreign Member (1948)
National Academy of Sciences
Foreign Member (1949)
Accademia delle Scienze di Torino
Foreign Member (1951)
Accademia dei Lincei
Foreign Member (1960)
Pontifical Academy of Sciences
(1961)
Royal Danish Academy of Sciences
Foreign Member (1962)
Paris Academy of Sciences
Foreign Member (1963)
Swiss Ancestry
(paternal)
French Ancestry
(paternal)
English Ancestry
(maternal)
Author of books:
Quantum Theory of the Electron
(
1928
)
The Principles of Quantum Mechanics
(
1930
)
Requires Flash 7+ and Javascript.
Do you know something we don't?
Submit a correction or make a comment about this profile
Copyright ©2019 Soylent Communications
|