Word: dirac
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Arnold Toynbee, inarticulate and somber, lunching daily on one banana and two apples. Albert Einstein, vainly seeking one more climactic insight, trudging home, declining rides, saying, "I must walk. I must walk." Physicist Paul A. M. Dirac, coatless in the coldest weather, striding the grounds, muffler flying. Physicist Wolfgang Pauli, while sipping tea in the faculty lounge, writing non-existent equations on an imaginary blackboard, then rubbing them out with an equally imaginary eraser...
...year in which a burst of work by Heisenberg, Dirac, de Braglie and others firmly established the new science of quantum mechanics...
...success at theory: "Quantum mechanics had just begun to come into existence. It was a very exciting time in physics. Anyone could just get in there and have fun." At Cambridge, Oppenheimer met some of the leaders in the fellowship of physics-such men as Max Born, Paul Dirac, and Niels Bohr ("It would be hard to exaggerate how much I venerate Bohr...
...their way. He wanted an international clientele at his Grand Hotel. Expatriate and exiled scholars have always been welcome at the Institute, but Oppenheimer had something different in mind: a continuous world traffic in ideas. For such foreign scholars as Denmark's Bohr and Britain's Dirac and Toynbee, Oppenheimer hoped to work out periodic repeat performances, so that they would never wholly lose touch either with the U.S. or with home base. Said Oppenheimer: "The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person...
Practical consequences are not yet in sight, for the wave mechanicians work in a never-never land far beyond the frontier of practical technology. But Nobelman Rabi compared Lamb & Retherford's criticism of the Dirac theory with Einstein's modification of Newton's laws of motion. It took 40 years for Einstein's relativity to grow into the atom bomb...