Paul Dirac

In Our Time

BBC

History

4.6 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2020

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the theoretical physicist Dirac (1902-1984), whose achievements far exceed his general fame. To his peers, he was ranked with Einstein and, when he moved to America in his retirement, he was welcomed as if he were Shakespeare. Born in Bristol, he trained as an engineer before developing theories in his twenties that changed the understanding of quantum mechanics, bringing him a Nobel Prize in 1933 which he shared with Erwin Schrödinger. He continued to make deep contributions, bringing abstract maths to physics, beyond predicting anti-particles as he did in his Dirac Equation. With Graham Farmelo Biographer of Dirac and Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge Valerie Gibson Professor of High Energy Physics at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College And David Berman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Queen Mary University of London Producer: Simon Tillotson

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.
0:04.8	Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time.
0:07.3	There's a reading list to go with it on our website,
0:09.5	and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter
0:12.8	at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programs.
0:16.7	Hello, Paul Dirac, 1902 to 1984,
0:19.7	made some of the greatest discoveries in 20th century physics,
0:22.9	second only to Einstein.
0:24.8	He used beautiful mathematics to reveal the fundamentals of nature,
0:28.1	such as antimatter, and his ideas have been described as
0:31.7	exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky.
0:35.6	Yet while there are many statues Einstein, there are barely any of Dirac,
0:39.2	even in his native Bristol. Despite his Nobel Prize,
0:42.5	his plaque in Westminster Abbey, and Stephen Hawking's claim that
0:46.3	Dirac was the greatest British theoretical physicist since Newton.
0:50.7	With me to discuss Paul Dirac's work in life, our David Berman,
0:54.2	professor of theoretical physics at Queen Mary University of London,
0:58.0	Val Gibson, professor of high energy physics at the University of Cambridge,
1:01.5	and fellow occidentic college, and Graham Parmaland,
1:04.3	biographer of Dirac and fellow Churchill College Cambridge.
1:07.9	Graham Parmaland, can you tell us about Dirac's early childhood and his
1:11.2	relationship with his parents?
	...

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