Paul Dirac Quotes

I read a lot of science books - I love cosmology, quantum theory, particle physics. So my idea of a great read would probably put you directly into a coma.

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology.

Physics as we know it will be over in six months.

No. I had successfully solved the difficulty of finding a description of the electron which was consistent with both relativity and quantum mechanics. Of course, when you solve one difficulty, other new difficulties arise. You then try to sove them. You can never solve all difficulties at once.

Many physicists these days sound like the Delphic oracle - with equations.

Well, our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is "God does not exist and Dirac is His prophet."

Often, when I want to read something that is satisfying to me as theology, what I actually read is string theory, or something like that - popularizations, inevitably, of scientific cosmologies - because their description of the scale of things and the intrinsic, astonishing character of reality coincides very beautifully with the most ambitious theology. It is thinking at that scale, and it is thinking that is invested with meaning in a humanly evocative form. That's theology.

In essence, we string theorists have been trying to work out the score of the universe, the harmonies of the universe, the mathematical vibrations that the strings would play. So musical metaphors have been with us in science since the beginning.

I had two passions when I was a child. First was to learn about Einstein's theory and help to complete his dream of a unified theory of everything. That's my day job. I work in something called string theory. I'm one of the founders of the subject. We hope to complete Einstein's dream of a theory of everything.

There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions.

I count Maxwell and Einstein, Eddington and Dirac, among "real" mathematicians. The great modern achievements of applied mathematics have been in relativity and quantum mechanics, and these subjects are at present at any rate, almost as "useless" as the theory of numbers.

To become a theoretical physicist ... you need to have a passionate love affair with the universe.

I recently forced myself to read a book on quantum physics, just to try and learn something new. I was confused by the middle of the first sentence and it all went downhill from there. The only thing I can remember learning is that a parallel universe can theoretically be contained on the head of a needle. I don't really know what that means, but I am now more careful handling needles.

Physics as we know it will be over in six months - Max Born

In the most modern theories of physics probability seems to have replaced aether as "the nominative of the verb 'to undulate'."

General relativity is in the old Newtonian framework where you predict what will happen, not the probability of what will happen. And putting together the probabilities of quantum mechanics with the certainty of general relativity, that's been the big challenge and that's why we have been excited about string theory, as it's one of the only approaches that can put it together.

Time, matter, space - all, it may be, are no more than a point.

The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus.

There is now a feeling that the pieces of physics are falling into place, not because of any single revolutionary idea or because of the efforts of any one physicist, but because of a flowering of many seeds of theory, most of them planted long ago.

On quantum theory I use up more brain grease (rough translation of German idiom) than on relativity.

I claim that relativity and the rest of modern physics is not complicated. It can be explained very simply. It is only unusual or, put another way, it is contrary to common sense.

Silly ideas, worth the admission price in smiles, but they're true. Is high-energy physics interesting because it's true or because it's crazy?

Far from being accidental details, the properties of nature's basic building blocks are deeply entwined with the fabric of space and time.

We already know the limits of Einstein's theories. From the centers of black holes at the very beginning of the universe - we call these singularities - Einstein's equations fail. In fact, people have joked that's where God is dividing by zero.

To say anything negative about Stephen Hawking is like bullying a blind man. He has an unfair disadvantage, and that gives him a free pass on some of his absurd ideas.