Anyone who uses a microwave oven or cellular phone, operates a computer, listens to a radio, watches television or takes prescription medication owes some gratitude to the late Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac.
A panel of internationally renowned scholars and Dirac's daughter, Monica Dirac, will assemble at Florida State University on Dec. 6 and 7 to celebrate the centennial of Dirac's birth. In addition to memorializing the former FSU physics professor, the panel will share stories about his life and engage in some very technical discussions about the accomplishments of a man recognized next to Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton and James Maxwell as one of the greatest scientists ever.
Dirac's centennial celebration, like his career, spans the Atlantic Ocean from his birthplace in Bristol, England, to his final resting place in Tallahassee. Celebrations were held earlier this year in Bristol and at the University of Cambridge, where Dirac held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics -- the same chair held by Newton -- from 1932 to 1969. He came to FSU in 1970 at the urging of the late Joseph Lannutti, founder of the university's high-energy physics program, and taught here until his death in 1984.
Physics Professor Howard Baer, the symposium's coordinator, has assembled an impressive list of scientists to talk about Dirac's life and work. Many of the presentations, though, may be indigestible for the casual observer.
"The man was a top ranked theoretical physicist. To do justice to the legacy of his work you have to get into the technical details of it," Baer said. "Dirac's contributions to humanity were couched in a mathematical framework. If you want to understand him in detail, it helps to be conversant in the language of physics."
In the 1920s, Dirac laid down the mathematical foundation of quantum mechanics, the study of matter and radiation at an atomic level. Then, in 1928 Dirac predicted the existence of antimatter by combining quantum mechanics with Einstein's theory of relativity.
This work led to the famous "Dirac equation," which explained the mysterious magnetic and "spin" properties of the electron and led to the development of modern day transistors, computer chips, many pharmaceutical drugs and a host of other gadgets. In 1933 Dirac shared the Nobel Prize with fellow physicist Erwin Schroedinger for their work on quantum mechanics.
Dirac was a complicated man who eschewed publicity, seldom socialized and enjoyed mountaineering and walking. When he learned he was to receive the Nobel Prize, Dirac considered refusing it because he didn't want the publicity. When advised that he would be the first person in history to refuse the prize, which would generate even more publicity, he accepted it.
But in mathematics, Dirac expressed himself in beauty and purpose.
"This result is too beautiful to be false; it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment," Dirac wrote in Scientific American in 1963. In an unattributed quote, Dirac once said: "God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world."
He wrote pages of mathematical equations on any piece of paper he could find: the back of a receipt, in the margins of books and magazines and on an announcement about stocks, for example. Hundreds of pages of his pencil scribblings, correspondences from friends and fellow scientists in addition to other memorabilia are housed in FSU's Paul A. M. Dirac Science Library. It's the most extensive collection of Dirac's professional and personal memorabilia in the world.
Librarian Sharon Schwerzel is gathering some of the collection's most notable pieces for display during the symposium. Probably the most treasured piece is a framed portion of the chalkboard from Dirac's FSU classroom on which he wrote his theory for quantum mechanics to begin one day's lecture.
"You see E=mc2 and you think of Einstein," Schwerzel said. "People who see this automatically think of Dirac."
Dirac was born on Aug. 8, 1902. A plaque memorializing him was placed in Westminster Abbey in 1995 next to Newton's grave. Dirac and his wife, Margit, are buried in Tallahassee's Roselawn Cemetery.
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