Word: dirac
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...existence was predicted in 1931 by British Theoretical Physicist Paul Dirac, and scientists have been looking for it ever since-on the ocean floor, in meteorites, Arctic ice and even moon rocks. Dirac, one of the fathers of quantum theory, said that magnetic particles might exist that are exclusively "north" or "south." Recent developments in quantum theory suggest that these single-poled units, or "monopoles," would have immense mass, about 10 million billion times that of a proton at rest. Placed on a table, a monopole would prove so heavy in relation to its size that it would fall through...
...even whole atoms could behave like waves. In Germany there was Werner Heisenberg, who postulated that the position of an electron could only be "statistically" predicted, never precisely ascertained. By his Uncertainty Principle, Heisenberg casually undermined the laws of causality on which classical physics was based, leaving Paul Dirac, back in England, to pull all these revolutionary theories together by accommodating them to the theory of relativity...
British Physicist Paul A.M. Dirac attacked this dilemma in 1931 with the newly developed tool of quantum mechanics. His calculations showed that there should indeed be a magnetic particle (or family of particles) that carries a basic magnetic charge-either north or south. That charge, said Dirac, would be 68.5 times as strong as the charge on an electron. Or it would be some multiple of 68.5-say, 137. Scientists had good reason to respect Dirac's reasoning. He had earlier predicted the existence of a positron, or positively charged counterpart of the electron. The positron was subsequently discovered...
...magnetic monopole is a magnetized particle which has only one pole-either north or south-rather than both poles as all other known magnetic objects have. Since Dirac first proposed monopoles in 1931, these elusive particles have been surprisingly useful in answering some of the fundamental questions of the universe...
...just moments away from some momentous discovery, the small Institute staff solicitously seeks to answer every reasonable human need. Because Mathematician Kurt Goedel is acutely sensitive to heat and cold, the temperature variations in his office were carefully charted for a month before he took occupancy. When Physicist Dirac's thoughtful walks were disturbed by a trailing dog, the staff sniffed out its owners, asked them to keep it at home. Even the members' own children are banned from the Institute's eight small, mostly red brick buildings, can run and shout only in the nearby faculty...