About this Item
Pp. 148-69. Original wrappers. Near Fine. First Edition. Author's offprint. "Dirac's scientific work often dealt with subjects that were far from mainstream physics. Typically for such an original mind, he preferred to cultivate new subjects according to his own tastes. He never cared about fashions of the physics community and accepted his self-chosen isolation. One example is his work on the classical theory of the electron, which started in 1938. . . . His paper of 1938 was an important contribution to electron theory and is still considered to be a classic. . . . Dirac was very dissatisfied with the state of the art in quantum electrodynamics and desperately searched of new ways to get rise of the infinities that plagued the theory. One strategy toward that end was to base quantum electrodynamics on an improved classical theory. This strategy had been considered earlier, for example, by Oppenheimer. . . . But neither Oppenheimer nor others seriously developed the idea before it was taken up by Dirac at the beginning of 1938. Although Dirac's theory was a classical one, very much in the tradition of Lorentz, Poincaré, and Abraham, it was clearly motivated by his wish to solve the divergence problems of quantum electrodynamics. . . . The Dirac electron was, as in earlier works on quantum theory, a point electron. . . . In accordance with his general view of physics, he did not attempt to build up a new model of the electron but tried to 'get a simple scheme of equations which can be used to calculate all the results that can be obtained from experiment' [p. 149]. It was always Dirac's ideal, in formulating a physical theory, to be able to work out a 'reasonable mathematical scheme' and then interpret the equations in the most direct and natural way. . . . The first occasion on which Dirac explained his new theory of classical electrons was in a talk given to the . . . [Del-Squared V] Club, probably in March 1938. . . . It was the secretary's duty to find speakers, and [Fred] Hoyle phoned Dirac to persuade him to give a talk. 'When he had understood my request,' Hoyle recalled, 'Dirac made a remark which nobody else in my experience would have conceived of: "I will put down the telephone for a minute and think, and then speak again," he said' " (Kragh, Dirac, a Scientific Biography, pp. 189, 191, 195). Kragh (1938b). There are brief discussions of Dirac's paper in Schweber, QED, p. 90; Pais, Inward Bound, pp. 390-391. Paul Dirac shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory.". Seller Inventory # 17400
Contact seller
Report this item
