
Paul Dirac: The unsung genius - twidlit
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/uk/2000/newsmakers/2094374.stm
======
Dn_Ab
Speaking of unsung geniuses there is someone who I am always surprised people
don't mention more. Everyone knows of Turing - no doubt related to the tragic
nature of his death due to disgusting treatment and the ubiquity of his
eponymous machine - but not as many know of or laud this person whose
influence is at least as great. I guess that is partially of his own
fashioning.

He laid the practical foundation of digital circuits by noting the
applicability of boolean algebra to circuit design. Electronic devices and
computers are descendants of his work. After a brief hiatus to work on
mathematical biology and cryptography he laid the foundation to the internet
with his work on Communications/Information theory and contributions to
sampling. His work on information theory is also vital in machine learning,
Natural language parsing, compression and more; it finds utility in quantum
physics and controversy in gravitational physics. He also had some of the
earliest working examples of wearable computing, algorithmic trading, and
artificial intelligence.

Arguably, mores so than any scientist of recent times, there is not a person
whose work more thoroughly infuses and touches our lives than Claude Shannon.

~~~
zerostar07
I don't get why geniuses need to be sung as if it's a popularity contest. It's
virtually impossible to do information theory without stumbling on Shannon's
theorems just like it's not possible to do physics without Dirac. Those who
need to know, do know.

~~~
Dn_Ab
They need to be sung because they can motivate people like me who read their
stories in isolation and proceed to cultivate an interest in science. The sung
heroes shape the tide of the collective imagination.

There is no need for affectations of wisdom; in an economy of attention, merit
just as popularity is a component in the vector of notability. Seeking to not
acknowledge these things in the name of purity only polarizes and does no one
any good.

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arethuza
Not being a physicist, but hanging out with control engineers for many years,
I was actually introduced to Dirac through his Delta Function:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_delta_function>

One thing I hadn't appreciated until recently was that Dirac held the Lucasian
Chair at Cambridge. The list of people who have held this post is really
_rather_ impressive:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasian_Professor_of_Mathemati...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasian_Professor_of_Mathematics)

~~~
zerostar07
He was also quite modest, not naming equations after himself, and used to
refer to Fermi-Dirac statistics as "Fermi statistics".

Btw, how did PAM Dirac come up? Is it some celebration i am unaware of?

~~~
arethuza
The earlier HN thread about Feynman mentions Dirac:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3230826>

------
ionfish
I recommend Graham Farmelo's 2009 biography of Dirac, _The Strangest Man_.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/02/paul-dirac-
str...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/02/paul-dirac-strangest-
man-farmelo-quantum)

I once started a physics degree at Bristol, where Dirac was born and raised,
and the department made a big show of 'their' man. The house he grew up in is
a few minutes' walk from the department, and has a blue plaque indicating its
status. It was some years before I discovered that Dirac had never been in the
physics department at all, but in fact studied electrical engineering, before
entering Cambridge, where he flourished as a physicist.

~~~
ikirill
One of the finer points of that book is that it is a biography of Dirac's
life, not just a description of his insights into physics. His personal life
was unhappy and makes for rather depressing reading. When Feynman was
described as a second Dirac, only this time human, it is difficult to
appreciate fully just how fundamentally different the personalities of the two
geniuses were.

Between studying electrical engineering and going to Cambridge he also earned
a degree in mathematics, if I recall correctly. He was not given a
sufficiently large scholarship the first time he was accepted to Cambridge,
and so he had to wait.

------
da-bacon
One of my favorite Dirac stories "An interview with Dirac":
[http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~greenfie/mill_courses/math421/i...](http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~greenfie/mill_courses/math421/int.html)

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dlokshin
"He accepted it [Nobel Prize] only when advised that, as the first person to
refuse a Nobel Prize, the publicity would be even greater"

Couldn't be more true.

~~~
phaus
The Nobel prize has become such a joke in the last two decades I am surprised
that rejecting it hasn't become the norm.

The Nobel peace prize has been awarded to a child molester, a supporter of
international terrorism, and a president who had just been elected. In
addition to these travesties there was also the "Inconvenient Truth" debacle.
(I'm not denying global warming, I just don't think being a narrator warrants
a medal and a million dollars.)

~~~
nl
I think you might be talking about the Nobel Peace Prize?

That is fairly different to the other Nobel prizes. As an example of how
different they are, the Noble Peace Prize is awarded by a Norwegian
committee[1], whilst the other prizes are awarded by various Swedish
committees[2][3][4].

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Nobel_Committee>

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Swedish_Academy_of_Scienc...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Swedish_Academy_of_Sciences)

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Assembly_at_Karolinska_In...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Assembly_at_Karolinska_Institutet)

[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Academy>

------
archgoon
You don't need the Dirac equation to understand semiconductor physics. Holes
are not positrons, and I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea that if positrons
had not been discovered or postulated, that the transistor would not have been
invented.

Without a doubt, it's really cool that we can say "Hey! We can actually
predict that electrons will have spin!", but you don't need to understand that
water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen to build a steam engine.

However, if someone can point me to writings by Shockley, Brattain, or
Bardeen, or a historical account that indicates otherwise, I'd be happy to
read it :)

~~~
Fixnum
I assume the article is referring to Fermi-Dirac statistics [1], not the Dirac
equation.

That said, the Dirac equation (or relativistic QM more generally) as well as
the Feynman path integral (the idea of which originated from a 1933 paper of
Dirac) are pretty indispensable in modern condensed matter physics.

[1]
[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%9...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fermi%E2%80%93Dirac_statistics#History)

~~~
archgoon
Two points

1) The article is primarily concerned with Dirac's relativistic formulation of
quantum mechanics. This is why they make the claim

'Without understanding the origin of spin, and the Dirac statistics, you
wouldn't have mobile phones, computers or anything else that runs on
electronics.'

However, Fermi-Dirac statistics can be derived directly from the properties of
fermions. True, you can derive the fact that electrons will be fermions
because of their spin from the spins-statistics theorem, but you only need to
know the Pauli Exclusion principle to get the F-D statistics.

2) My understanding, and speaking with engineers in the field, is that most of
the applied industrial research uses empirically derived band structures
(which definitely does require Rel. QM to derive from first principles) and
regular QM to design devices. This is also the approach I've seen in most
semiconductor simulators. However, it is entirely possible that Intel or AMD
take a different approach. Not having access to the tools they use, I can't
speak to their tech.

However, you seem to be a knowledgeable person, so I'd be more than happy to
be informed that I'm full of shit here. :)

------
Jd
A bit of an aside, but one of the best Evangelion episodes invovlves a Dirac
Sea: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aoLMp6q3js>

~~~
apu
I always cringe when I see math or programming or anything I know something
about in popular media as it's usually done so poorly.

So how badly did they butcher the concept of the Dirac sea for the episode? Of
course it's all fiction anyways, so it doesn't really matter, but the inner
geek in me wants to know!

~~~
Jd
Unusually, I don't think it was butchered particularly badly. The sea I
believe existed inside of the attacking "angel," and had certain
psychological-probing properties.

------
richbradshaw
There's been the same poster of him within an average of 1km from me since I
was 17!

My Physics class room at college had a copy, then my University had one, and
now I have one in my Physics class room.

So, pretty sure that he's well sung, at least in the rooms I visit!

------
rb2k_
Little trivia: The BCC develops a wavelet based video codec they call
"Dirac"[0]

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_(video_compression_format...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac_\(video_compression_format\))

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stashdot
Yeah, he won a Nobel when he was 31. He's only unsung among the under-read.

