Paul Dirac Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

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 the case of poetry, it's the exact opposite!

Paul Dirac
God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.

Paul Dirac
Only questions about the results of experiments have a real significance and it is only such questions that theoretical physics has to consider.

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
Just by studying mathematics we can hope to make a guess at the kind of mathematics that will come into the physics of the future. A good many people are working on the mathematical basis of quantum theory, trying to understand the theory better and to make it more powerful and more beautiful. If someone can hit on the right lines along which to make this development, it may lead to a future advance in which people will first discover the equations and then, after examining them, gradually learn how to apply them.

Paul Dirac
Age is, of course, a fever chill
That every physicist must fear.
He's better dead than living still
When once he's past his thirtieth year.

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
The present stage of physical theory is merely a step-pingstone towards the better stages that we will have in the future. One can be quite sure that there will be better stages simply because of the difficulties that occur in the physics of today.

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

Paul Dirac
The only object of theoretical physics is to calculate results that can be compared with experiment...it is quite unnecessary that any satisfactory description of the whole course of the phenomena should be given.

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
It seems that some essentially new physical ideas are here needed.

Paul Dirac
The steady progress of physics requires for its theoretical formulations a mathematics that gets continually more advanced.

Paul Dirac
One does not get anywhere simply by going over the successes again and again, whereas talking over the difficulties people can hope to make some progress.

Paul Dirac
I consider that I understand an equation when I can predict the properties of its solutions, without actually solving it.

Paul Dirac
From now on there will be no physical treatise which is not primarily mathematical.

Paul Dirac
Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better.

Paul Dirac
The existing theories of the interaction of elementary particles and fields are all unsatisfactory in one way or another. The imperfections may well arise from the use of wrong dynamical systems to represent atomic phenomena, i.e., wrong Hamiltonians and wrong interaction energies. It thus becomes a matter of great importance to set up new dynamical systems and see if they will better describe the atomic world.

Paul Dirac
It is nice, but in one of the chapters the author made a mistake. He describes the sun as rising twice on the same day.
On the novel Crime and Punishment

Paul Dirac
One possibility in this direction is to regard, classically, an electron as the end of a single Faraday line of force. The electric field in this picture from discrete Faraday lines of force, which are to be treated as physical things, like strings. One has then to develop a dynamics for such a string like structure, and quantize it.... In such a theory a bare electron would be inconceivable, since one cannot imagine the end of a piece of string without having the string.

Paul Dirac
Mathematics is the tool specially suited for dealing with abstract concepts of any kind and there is no limit to its power in this field.

Paul Dirac
It seems clear that the present quantum mechanics is not in its final form. Some further changes will be needed, just about as drastic as the changes made in passing from Bohr's orbit theory to quantum mechanics. Some day a new quantum mechanics, a relativistic one, will be discovered, in which we will not have these infinities occurring at all. It might very well be that the new quantum mechanics will have determinism in the way that Einstein wanted.

Paul Dirac
I think it is a 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.

Paul Dirac
The measure of greatness in a scientific idea is the extent to which it stimulates thought and opens up new lines of research.

Paul Dirac
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.

Paul Dirac
The research worker, in his efforts to express the fundamental laws of Nature in mathematical form, should strive mainly for mathematical beauty. He should take simplicity into consideration in a subordinate way to beauty... It often happens that the requirements of simplicity and beauty are the same, but where they clash, the latter must take precedence.

Paul Dirac
If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand. Again and again, when I have been at a loss how to proceed, I have just had to wait until I have felt the mathematics led me by the hand. It has led me along an unexpected path, a path where new vistas open up, a path leading to new territory, where one can set up a base of operations, from which one can survey the surroundings and plan future progress.

Paul Dirac
Theoretical physicists accept the need for mathematical beauty as an act of faith...For example, the main reason why the theory of relativity is so universally accepted is its mathematical beauty.

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

Paul Dirac