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

A personal comment. When I was a student at St John's College, Cambridge,
two of the Fellows of that college were Fred Hoyle and Paul Dirac. Hoyle
gave undergraduate lectures (which I took)and attended student society
dinners. Dirac was inaccessible to students.
Don

> 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
>
> ---- "Alexanian wrote:
>> http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bn-review/note.asp?note=24150422
>>
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Received on Sun Aug 23 04:26:36 2009