Paul Dirac - Work Quotes

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A great deal of my work is just playing with equations and seeing what they give.

Paul Dirac
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.

Paul Dirac
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. If there is not complete agreement between the results of one's work and experiment, one should not allow oneself to be too discouraged, because the discrepancy may well be due to minor features that are not properly taken into account and that will get cleared up with further development of the theory.

Paul Dirac
It has become increasingly evident in recent times, however, that nature works on a different plan. Her fundamental laws do not govern the world as it appears in our mental picture in any very direct way, but instead they control a substratum of which we cannot form a mental picture without introducing irrelevancies.

Paul Dirac
A book on the new physics, if not purely descriptive of experimental work, must essentially be mathematical.

Paul Dirac
Some physicists may be happy to have a set of working rules leading to results in agreement with observation. They may think that this is the goal of physics. But it is not enough. One wants to understand how Nature works.

Paul Dirac