Re: [asa] URL: The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom

I never met Dirac but went through his QM book I think 3 times completely in
grad school. John Albright, a physicist who is on the steering committee of
the ELCA Alliance on Faith, Science and Technology was a colleague of
Dirac's during his (Dirac's) last years at Florida State & has some
interesting anecdotes.
Dirac is buried in Tallahassee but there is a memorial plaque in
Westminister Abbey -
http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/28693/1/cerndirac3_9-02 . (Dirac
himself usually didn't write the equation in the manifestly covariant way
shown here!) According to John there was some question about the
appropriateness of this since since there's little indication of Dirac's
religious beliefs (if any) but someone came up with a poem he'd written that
apparently gave some indication of religiosity & that got him in. (OTOH
Dirac did say, in his 1963 article in Scientific American, "God is a
mathematician of a very high order.")

Whether or not that makes this thread sufficiently science-religion related
for the list may be questioned, but it's sure nice to be able to talk about
physics instead of evolution once in awhile!

Shalom
George
http://home.roadrunner.com/~scitheologyglm

----- Original Message -----
From: "Alexanian, Moorad" <alexanian@uncw.edu>
To: <gmurphy10@neo.rr.com>; "AmericanScientificAffiliation" <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Saturday, August 22, 2009 11:06 AM
Subject: RE: [asa] URL: The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac,
Mystic of the Atom

George,
I know the story well. It seems that Dirac had made a vague connection
between commutators and classical Poisson brackets. However, this was on a
weekend when the library was closed and Dirac had to wait anxiously until
Monday to be able to verify his hunch. I often tell that to students to make
them realize the wealth of information that they can immediately access
online. Those were the good old days!
Dirac became my scientific hero when I started to study quantum mechanics
from his book, eight hours a day during the first summer of my first year as
a graduate student. I actually went to hear Dirac at Xavier University in
Cincinnati, sponsored by Podolsky of the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen
(EPR) paradox, while a graduate student. My wife Mary took my book and had
Dirac signed it. The nuns that were at the lecture were impressed that
someone would ask the autograph of such an illustrious scientist instead of
the usual athletic jocks as most do.

Moorad
________________________________________
From: gmurphy10@neo.rr.com [gmurphy10@neo.rr.com]
Sent: Saturday, August 22, 2009 10:33 AM
To: AmericanScientificAffiliation; Alexanian, Moorad
Subject: Re: [asa] URL: The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac,
Mystic of the Atom

Just one comment on the article. When Dirac was asked once what he saw as
his greatest discovery (or maybe it was his most satisfying discovery),
expecting it to be the Dirac equation, Dirac was surprised him. It was, he
said, the relationship between commutators and Poisson brackets.

Shalom,
George

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Received on Sat Aug 22 11:55:16 2009