Background
Born August 8, 1902 in Bristol, England. The first school he attended was Bishop Primary school. It is here where his enhanced abilities in mathematics were discovered. When he was 12 he entered a secondary school where his father taught. In 1918 he completed his school education and went to the University of Bristol. It was here where he studied electrical engineering. In 1921 he got his degree in engineering In June of 1921 he took the Cambridge scholarship examinations and was awarded a scholarship to study mathematics at St. Johns college in Cambridge. He was also awarded a grant to undertake research at Cambridge. Here he began his studies. In 1926 he was awarded a P.h.D for his doctoral thesis on quantum mechanics. Dirac had 11 papers in print before submitting his doctoral dissertation.
The Atom
After he was awarded his degree he went to Copenhagen to work with a famous scientists Niels Bohr. In Feb. 1927 he moved on to Gottingen where he interacted with Robert Oppenheimer, Max Born and many others. In 1930 Dirac published “The Principles of Quantum Mechanics.” In 1933 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. In his work on studying the atom he built upon Wolfgang Pauli’s work on non-relativistic spins. In 1928 he proposed the Dirac equation. It was a relativistic equation of motion for the wave function of the electron. This equation led him to predict the exsistence of the positron,(the antiparticle of the electron, identical to it in almost every way but it’s charge). In 1932 the positron was observed by a man named Carl Anderson. It turned out Dirac was right. Dirac also contributed to the study of the atom by explaining the orgin quantum spin as a relativistic phenomenon. On October 20, 1984 Paul Dirac died. He was a strange man.
