Paul Dirac

From Engineering to Physics

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on 8 August 1902 in Bristol, England. He was educated in Bristol and studied electrical engineering at the University of Bristol, receiving his BSc in Engineering in 1921.

Dirac then studied mathematics at Bristol before moving to Cambridge in 1923 as a research student, working under Ralph Fowler. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 1926 and became a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, in 1927.

The Dirac Equation

Dirac began working on the new quantum mechanics soon after Heisenberg's 1925 breakthrough. He developed his own powerful mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics.

In 1928, Dirac formulated the relativistic equation now known as the Dirac equation. The equation incorporated quantum mechanics and special relativity for the electron. Its mathematics implied states corresponding to a particle with the same mass as the electron but opposite charge — an antiparticle.

Carl Anderson experimentally discovered the positron in 1932. Dirac had theoretically predicted an electron antiparticle; he did not experimentally discover the positron himself.

Cambridge and the Nobel Prize

Dirac was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1930. In 1932, he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge — the professorship once held by Isaac Newton. He held the Lucasian chair until 1969.

Dirac shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics with Erwin Schrödinger for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.

Legacy

Dirac's work was foundational to quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory, though he did not create either field alone. His mathematical style was famously concise, and his equation remains one of the most important in modern physics.

Later in life, Dirac became a professor at Florida State University. He died on 20 October 1984 in Tallahassee, Florida.