'The most magical equation in physics': How Paul Dirac accidentally revealed the strange world of an

'The most magical equation in physics': How Paul Dirac accidentally revealed the strange world of antimatter

By Marcus Chown published 2 days ago
"Of all the equations of physics, perhaps the most magical is the Dirac equation."

British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac was one of the most significant figures in the early days of quantum physics, who along with Erwin Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1933. But it was in 1927 that this quiet, but brilliant mind set to work looking for "pretty mathematics," and in doing so formulated what would become one of his greatest achievements — the Dirac equation.

In this extract from the Antimatter chapter of his book "'The One Thing You Need to Know'," author Marcus Chown explains how Dirac's unusual methods and mannerisms helped guide us towards understanding the fundamental physics that forms the world around us.

Nature has chosen to double the number of its basic building blocks. For every subatomic particle, remarkably there exists an "'antiparticle"' with opposite properties such as electric charge. Before 1927, nobody had the slightest suspicion that such a world of "'antimatter"' existed. But that year, the British physicist Paul Dirac wrote down an equation that described an electron travelling at close to the speed of light and noticed that it contained something odd.

Dirac was one of the pioneers of quantum theory, the revolutionary description of the submicroscopic realm of atoms and their constituents. The theory reconciled two seemingly contradictory characteristics of the world revealed in experiments in the first quarter of the twentieth century: the ability of atoms and their like to behave both as localized particles and as spread-out waves. In 1926, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger encapsulated this in the Schrödinger equation, which describes quantum waves of probability spreading through space.

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