Paul Dirac Short Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

View all Paul Dirac Quotes
God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
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
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
The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things.

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
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
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
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
It is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment…The discrepancy may well be due to minor features…that will get cleared up with further developments.

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