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I went back to Cambridge at the beginning of October, 1925, and resumed my previous style of life, intense thinking about these problems during the w… - Paul Dirac
" "I went back to Cambridge at the beginning of October, 1925, and resumed my previous style of life, intense thinking about these problems during the week and relaxing on Sunday, going for a long walk in the country alone... It was during one of the Sunday walks in October, 1925, when I was thinking very much about this uv - vu, in spite of my intention to relax, that I thought about Poisson brackets. I remembered something which I had read up previously in advanced books of dynamics about these strange quantities, Poisson brackets, and from what I could remember, there seemed to be a close similarity between a Poisson bracket of two quantities, u and v, and the commutator uv - vu. The idea first came in a flash, I suppose, and provided of course some excitement, and then of course came the reaction "No, this is probably wrong." I did not remember very well the precise formula for a Poisson bracket, and only had some vague recollections. But there were exciting possibilities there, and I thought that I might be getting to some big new idea... it was a Sunday evening then and the libraries were all closed. I just had to wait impatiently through that night without knowing whether this idea was really any good or not, but still I think that my confidence gradually grew during the course of the night. The next morning I hurried along to one of the libraries as soon as it was open, and then I looked up Poisson brackets in Whittaker's Analytical Dynamics, and I found that they were just what I needed.
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About Paul 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
Native Name:
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
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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Additional quotes by Paul Dirac
... people have tried to establish analogies with systems in classical mechanics, such as vibrating strings or membranes... Such analogies have led to the name 'Wave Mechanics' being sometimes given to quantum mechanics. It is important to remember, however, that the superposition that occurs in quantum mechanics is of an essentially different nature from any occurring in the classical theory, as is shown by the fact that the quantum superposition principle demands indeterminacy in the results of observations in order to be capable of a sensible physical interpretation. The analogies are thus liable to be misleading.
A good deal of my research work in physics has consisted in not setting out to solve some particular problems, but simply examining mathematical quantities of a kind that physicists use and trying to get them together in an interesting way regardless of any application that the work may have. It is simply a search for pretty mathematics. It may turn out later that the work does have an application. Then one has had good luck.
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