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Paul Dirac

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Bristolian theoretical physicist, ranked alongside Einstein by his peers, who won a Nobel for his work on quantum mechanics.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the theoretical physicist Dirac (1902-1984), whose achievements far exceed his general fame. To his peers, he was ranked with Einstein and, when he moved to America in his retirement, he was welcomed as if he were Shakespeare. Born in Bristol, he trained as an engineer before developing theories in his twenties that changed the understanding of quantum mechanics, bringing him a Nobel Prize in 1933 which he shared with Erwin Schr枚dinger. He continued to make deep contributions, bringing abstract maths to physics, beyond predicting anti-particles as he did in his Dirac Equation.

With

Graham Farmelo
Biographer of Dirac and Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge

Valerie Gibson
Professor of High Energy Physics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College

And

David Berman
Professor of Theoretical Physics at Queen Mary University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

51 minutes

Last on

Thu 5 Mar 2020 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

READING LIST:

Marcus Chown, The Magicians: Great Minds and the Central Miracle of Science (Faber & Faber, 2020)

Frank Close, Antimatter (Oxford University Press, 2018)

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, The Quantum Universe: Everything that can happen does happen (Penguin, 2012)

P.A.M. Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (first published 1930; Oxford University Press, 1988)

James E. Dodd and Ben Gripaios, The Ideas of Particle Physics (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

Graham Farmelo, The Strangest Man: The hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius (Faber & Faber, 2009)

Graham Farmelo, The Universe Speaks in Numbers: How Modern Maths Reveals Nature鈥檚 Deepest Secrets (Faber & Faber, 2020)

Helge Kragh, Dirac: A Scientific Biography (Cambridge University Press, 1990)

Anthony Zee, Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics (Princeton University Press, 2016)

Broadcasts

  • Thu 5 Mar 2020 09:00
  • Thu 5 Mar 2020 21:30

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