Paul Dirac Quotes
The methods of theoretical physics should be applicable to all those branches of thought in which the essential features are expressible with numbers.
Farmelo, Graham. The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom. Basic Books, 2009.
This quotation is important for politicians who appropriate research funds. There are many, important, significant, scientific findings, that are inherent to what we already know, but needs the scientific person-power and time to “work it out.”
Historically, in the first half of the 20th century, nuclear scientists discovered that probability governed and was necessary for understanding quantum mechanics—the laws of physics governing tiny objects like atoms, electrons, protons and even quarks. To many, this seemed a contradiction in that it was hard to conceive particles following laws and yet behaving randomly at the same time. However, it did not take long before all the scientists adjusted their thinking and learned to live and work with that was then a type of contradiction but is no longer thought so as men and women have learned to think in a new way. This quotation illustrates that the greatest scientists in the world, in a very short period of time, had to change their entire mode of thinking. There were no real holdouts or “conservatives” who wanted to maintain the older values. This would never happen in politics, where change is not accepted very quickly.
For many scientists, this is the goal of each area of inquiry. For others, the science is crude and really not understood unless the mathematical model exists and can be verified experimentally. For Thompson, this was the difference between understanding and not.
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac OM FRS was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century.
