Quote

I learnt to distrust all physical concepts as the basis for a theory. Instead one should put one's trust in a mathematical scheme, even if the scheme does not appear at first sight to be connected with physics. One should concentrate on getting interesting mathematics.

Paul Dirac

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Paul Dirac
Age: 82 †
Born: 1902
Born: August 8
Died: 1984
Died: October 20
Academic
Educator
Engineer
Mathematician
Physicist
Professor
Scientist
Teacher
Theoretical Physicist
Bristol
Gloucestershire
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
Paul A M Dirac
P A M Dirac
P. A. M. Dirac
Trust
Bases
Scheme
Getting
Mathematics
Distrust
Interesting
Concepts
Schemes
Science
Connected
Concentrate
Doe
Sight
Mathematical
Firsts
Physical
Physics
First
Theory
Appear
Even
Instead
Basis
Learnt

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A physical law must possess mathematical beauty.
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Quantum mechanics has explained all of chemistry and most of physics.
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I think it is the general rule that the originator of a new idea is not the most suitable person to develop it, because his fears of something going wrong are really too strong... At age 69.
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I think it is a peculiarity of myself that I like to play about with equations, just looking for beautiful mathematical relations which maybe don't have any physical meaning at all. Sometimes they do. At age 60.
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When [Erwin Schrödinger] went to the Solvay conferences in Brussels, he would walk from the station to the hotel where the delegates stayed, carrying all his luggage in a rucksack and looking so like a tramp that it needed a great deal of argument at the reception desk before he could claim a room.
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Living is worthwhile if one can contribute in some small way to this endless chain of progress.
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A termination of one's life is necessary in the scheme of things to provide a logical reason for unselfishness. . . . The fact that there is an end to one's life compels one to take an interest in things that will continue to live after one is dead.
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Scientific progress is measured in units of courage, not intelligence.
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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.
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There are always more people who prefer to speak than to listen.
Paul Dirac
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The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.
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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.
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What makes the theory of relativity so acceptable to physicists in spite of its going against the principle of simplicity is its great mathematical beauty. This is a quality which cannot be defined, any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating.
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Well, in the first place, it leads to great anxiety as to whether it's going to be correct or not ... I expect that's the dominating feeling. It gets to be rather a fever... At age 60, when asked about his feelings on discovering the Dirac equation.
Paul Dirac
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One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.
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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 is the exact opposite.
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As time goes on, it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which Nature has chosen.
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The shortage of buyers, which the world is suffering from, is readily understood, not as due to people not wishing to obtain possession of goods, but as people being unwilling to part with something which might earn a regular income in exchange for those goods.
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It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment.
Paul Dirac