When you ask what are electrons and protons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. T… - Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
" "When you ask what are electrons and protons I ought to answer that this question is not a profitable one to ask and does not really have a meaning. The important thing about electrons and protons is not what they are but how they behave, how they move. I can describe the situation by comparing it to the game of chess. In chess, we have various chessmen, kings, knights, pawns and so on. If you ask what chessman is, the answer would be that it is a piece of wood, or a piece of ivory, or perhaps just a sign written on paper, or anything whatever. It does not matter. Each chessman has a characteristic way of moving and this is all that matters about it. The whole game os chess follows from this way of moving the various chessmen.
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About Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English mathematical and theoretical physicist who is considered to be one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Dirac laid the foundations for both quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a professor of physics at Florida State University, and a 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient.
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Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Paul A M Dirac
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P A M Dirac
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P. A. M. Dirac
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Paul Dirac
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Additional quotes by Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
The reader.. may argue that a very strange idea has been introduced — the possibility of a photon being partly in each of two states of polarization, or partly in each of two separate beams — but even with the help of this strange idea no satisfying picture of the fundamental single-photon processes has been given... it may be remarked that the main object of physical science is not the provision of pictures, but is the formulation of laws governing phenomena and the application of these laws to the discovery of new phenomena. If a picture exists, so much the better; but whether a picture exists or not is a matter of only secondary importance. In the case of atomic phenomena no picture can be expected to exist in the usual sense of the word 'picture', by which is meant a model functioning essentially on classical lines. One may, however, extend the meaning of the word 'picture' to include any way of looking at the fundamental laws which makes their self-consistency obvious. With this extension, one may gradually acquire a picture of atomic phenomena by becoming familiar with the laws of the quantum theory.
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Classical mechanics has been developed continuously from the time of Newton and applied to an ever-widening range of dynamical systems, including the electromagnetic field in interaction with matter. The underlying ideas and the laws governing their application form a simple and elegant scheme, which one would be inclined to think could not be seriously modified without having all its attractive features spout. Nevertheless it has been found possible to set up a new scheme, called quantum mechanics, which is more suitable for the description of phenomena on the atomic scale and which is in some respects more elegant and satisfying than the classical scheme. This possibility is due to the changes which the new scheme involves being of a very profound character and not clashing with the features of the classical theory that make it so attractive, as a result of which all these features can be incorporated in the new scheme.
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