On August 8, 1902, one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century was born in the English town of Bristol: Paul Dirac.
After obtaining his doctorate in 1926 with a thesis entitled "Quantum Mechanics", which later also became the title of his most famous book (first printed in 1930, after he began lecturing at St John's College in Cambridge), he left for Copenhagen to study under the illustrious Niels Bohr; about him Dirac said:
"I admired Bohr very much. We had very long conversations during which almost all he did was talk".
During his Danish period, Dirac developed the theory of canonical transformations in quantum mechanics, an achievement that Dirac himself considered one of the most rewarding of his scientific career. In this field, he introduced a very useful tool of modern physics: the Dirac delta function.
In total he published more than 200 articles, but the one that gave him glory and honor (although not in a short time) was the one in which he developed his famous Dirac Equation, which describes the motion of fermions (particles with spin 1/2) by combining the two great theories of the twentieth century, Quantum Mechanics and the Theory of Relativity. After he was over sixty years old, he was asked to describe the emotions he felt when he discovered his equation, he said:
"there was a lot of anxiety, waiting to establish whether or not it was correct". A few years later he added: "hopes are always accompanied by fear and in scientific research fear risks becoming dominant.
Numerous anecdotes surround the figure of Dirac, but we would like to leave them aside and focus on a phrase that Niels Bohr said:
"Of all physicists, Dirac has the purest soul".
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