In memory of the the man who gave his name to the minimum unit of time, the dirac, or the amount of quantum time it takes a photon to exist in one plank unit before it makes the leap to the next. Paul Diracs name is also used as a large unit of time. A googledirac (roughly an hour) is the amount of average amount of time between his words, usually a brief sentence a day. Albert Einstein said of him, This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful. An anecdote recounted in a review of the 2009 biography tells of Werner Heisenberg and Dirac sailing on an ocean liner to a conference in Japan in August 1929. Both still in their twenties, and unmarried, they made an odd couple. Heisenberg was a ladies man who constantly flirted and danced, while Dirac—an Edwardian geek, as biographer Graham Farmelo puts it—suffered agonies if forced into any kind of socialising or small talk. Why do you dance? Dirac asked his companion. When there are nice girls, it is a pleasure, Heisenberg replied. Dirac pondered this notion, then blurted out: But, Heisenberg, how do you know beforehand that the girls are nice? According to a story told in different versions, a friend or student visited Dirac, not knowing of his marriage. Noticing the visitors surprise at seeing an attractive woman in the house, Dirac said, This is... this is Wigners sister Another story told of Dirac is that when he first met the young Richard Feynman at a conference, he said after a long silence I have an equation. Do you have one too?. After he presented a lecture at a conference, one colleague raised his hand and said I dont understand the equation on the top-right-hand corner of the blackboard. After a long silence, the moderator asked Dirac if he wanted to answer the question, to which Dirac replied That was not a question, it was a comment. His one recorded episode of voluabilty came in the form of a denunciation of religion. Heisenberg recollected a conversation among young participants at the 1927 Solvay Conference about Einstein and Plancks views on religion between Wolfgang Pauli, Heisenberg and Dirac. Diracs contribution was a criticism of the political purpose of religion, which was much appreciated for its lucidity by Bohr when Heisenberg reported it to him later. Among other things, Dirac said: “ I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest—and scientists have to be—we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I cant for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards—in heaven if not on earth—all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins. ” Heisenbergs view was tolerant. Pauli, raised as a Catholic, had kept silent after some initial remarks, but when finally he was asked for his opinion, said: Well, our friend Dirac has got a religion and its guiding principle is There is no God and Paul Dirac is His prophet. Everybody, including Dirac, burst into laughter. Diracs views towards the idea of God were less acerbic than his ideas of the social role of religion. As an author of an article appearing in the May 1963 edition of Scientific American, Dirac wrote: “It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better. ” In 1971, at a conference meeting, Dirac expressed his views on the existence of God. Dirac explained that the existence of God could only be justified if an improbable event were to have taken place in the past: “ It could be that it is extremely difficult to start life. It might be that it is so difficult to start life that it has happened only once among all the planets. Let us consider, just as a conjecture, that the chance life starting when we have got suitable physical conditions is 10^-100. (I dont have any logical reason for proposing this figure, I just want you to consider it as a possibility.) Under those conditions...it is almost certain that life would not have started. And I feel that under those conditions it will be necessary to assume the existence of a god (sic re article and lower case) to start off life. I would like, therefore, to set up this connexion between the existence of a god and the physical laws: if physical laws are such that to start off life involves an excessively small chance, so that it will not be reasonable to suppose that life would have started just by blind chance, then there must be a god, and such a god would probably be showing his influence in the quantum jumps which are taking place later on. On the other hand, if life can start very easily and does not need any divine influence, then I will say that there is no god.” Dirac did not commend himself to any definite view, but he described the possibilities for answering the question of God in a scientific manner. I would propose, however, that if such is an improbability is discerned (some have been proposed) it at most can be said to indicate a possible point where an intelligent designer (Perhaps not the Mathematician itself, tho, as Dirac seemed to think. I have more than one idea of God), might have intervened, while the absence of evidence in this case, is only hypothetically evidence of absence. youtube/watch?v=fWo010EsiYk
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 17:38:03 +0000
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