The Philosopher
Paul Dirac
The face
The background
- Nationality:
- British
- Schools:
- Quantum mechanics, Quantum field theory
- Branchs:
- Quantum physics, Particle physics
- Period:
- Quantum Mechanics
The synopsis
The works
The Principles of Quantum Mechanics
The quotes
Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.
In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress.
I do not see how a man can work on the frontiers of physics and write poetry at the same time. They are in opposition.
God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.
There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.
The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.
The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved.
I should like to suggest to you that the cause of all the economic troubles is that we have an economic system which tries to maintain an equality of value between two things, which it would be better to recognise from the beginning as of unequal value.