Questions tagged [dirac]

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Dirac’s debt to Hamilton

According to Tobias Hurter’s popular exposition Too Big for a Single Mind (narrated in the present tense): Dirac makes use of an elegant mathematical tool developed by the Irish mathematician William ...
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Was there any discourse between Dirac and Einstein that was recorded in print or noted?

I read in Wiki they were together at the Solvay Conderence. There is also a note from 1926 letter to Paul Ehrenfest, Albert Einstein wrote of a Dirac paper, "I am toiling over Dirac. This ...
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Who first stated the three polarizers experiment in quantum mechanics?

In my experience, Dirac is most often cited as the origin of this thought experiment. However, from what I've read in his Principles of Quantum Mechanics, he never actually introduces the idea with ...
Sam Gallagher's user avatar
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What did Einstein say about the Dirac equation?

The wiki article on Dirac quotes Einstein as saying of Dirac I have trouble with Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful. and I don't understand Dirac at all. ...
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2 votes
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The original Dirac equation

In the original 1928 paper (pdf) the Dirac equation appears on page 615 in equation (9) as $$ [p_0+\rho_1\left(\boldsymbol{\sigma},\boldsymbol{p}\right)+\rho_3mc]\psi=0\qquad(1) $$ Using the ...
Trond Saue's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
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Original mathematical foundation of Dirac's function

In which paper/book (most likely) by either Sobolev or Schwartz is the Dirac function properly and explicitly substantiated as a functional (tempered distribution), preferably quoting Dirac's name? I ...
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Dirac's non-neglibile disturbances argument and epistemic quantum mechanics

Here is Dirac's argument about one reason to motivate quantum mechanics: "It is usually assumed that, by being careful, we may cut down the disturbance accompanying our observation to any desired ...
J Kusin's user avatar
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5 votes
1 answer
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Why is Dirac delta named after Dirac when the concept was already over two centuries old?

Please explain why the Dirac delta function was named after Dirac, who lived in the 20th century, and what was so special about it. I ask this because it is used in Green's function which pre-dated ...
rupert's user avatar
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14 votes
2 answers
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Was Dirac really trying to take the square root of the Klein-Gordon operator?

As a student of physics one will, on several occasions, indubitably hear professors or other physicists (here is an example, from Physics.SE's highest-rep user John Rennie) tell the famous story that ...
Danu's user avatar
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