Paul Dirac Short Biography

Paul Dirac A brief biography of an English physicist is outlined in this article.

Paul Dirac Short Biography

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on August 8, 1902 in Bristol.

In 1921 he graduated with honors from the University of Bristol with a degree in electrical engineering. In 1923 he entered graduate school at Cambridge University. Interested in Heisenberg's work on matrix mechanics, Dirac developed his original approach to quantum problems and presented it in a series of articles published in 1925-1926 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. In 1926 received a Ph.D. During the year he worked with N. Bohr in Copenhagen and M. Born in Göttingen, then returned to Cambridge, where he was elected a member of the Council of St. John's College. In 1929 he taught physics at the University of Wisconsin.
In 1928, Dirac derived the relativistic equation for an electron, which explained the fine structure of the spectra of the hydrogen atom and the Zeeman effect. In 1931, Dirac put forward a hypothesis about the existence of an elementary magnetic charge - a monopole, in 1933 - antimatter.
Dirac made a great contribution to the creation of quantum statistics. In 1926, independently of E. Fermi, he developed statistics on particles with a half-integer spin (Fermi – Dirac statistics). In 1931, he substantiated the possibility of the existence of symmetric quantum electrodynamics, based on the concept of elementary magnetic charges.

In 1937, Dirac hypothesized the change in gravity over time. In 1962, he developed the muon theory, considering the latter as an oscillatory state of an electron, dealt with the problem of the Hamiltonian formulation of the theory of gravity with the goal of further quantization of the gravitational field.

Dirac died in Tallahassee (pc. Florida) October 20, 1984.