Word: dirac
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...more the physicists learn, the less they are sure of. Last week a glittering tribe of top-rank physicists met at Princeton as part of the University's bicentennial celebration. Conference high points: addresses by Nobel Prizewinners Paul A. M. Dirac, of Britain, and Denmark's Niels Bohr, both of whom stressed the scientist's extraordinary difficulty in describing the simplest things...
...nature. Quantum mechanics is an exact, mathematical system for dealing with atoms and radiation. So named because its fundamental principle is that energy is exchanged in separate, indivisible bundles called quanta, quantum mechanics has been powerfully developed by such giants of physics as Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrodinger and Dirac (Nobel Prizewinners all). It has interpreted the laws of radiation, the laws of specific heat, the details of atomic, molecular and X-ray spectra...
...sponsored by the League of Nations1 International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, was in session there, attended by some 30 giants of theoretical physics. On hand were Denmark's Niels Bohr and France's Louis de Broglie. Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrodinger of Germany and Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac of England had been expected but did not appear. These five men alone have created almost the whole structure of Quantum Mechanics, which deals mathematically with the mathematically complex innards of the atom. Presumably, Herren Heisenberg and Schrodinger were forbidden to attend because of the Nazi Government's antipathy...
...same as those of a championship tennis player. Most of the five bigwigs of Quantum Mechanics did their most important work when they were very young men. Heisenberg, for example, laid down his celebrated Uncertainty Principle (relating to the position and velocity of electrons) when he was 26; Dirac mathematically deduced the existence of the positive electron when he was 28. Once a theorist has constructed a powerful new theory, he is likely to become fond of it and spend much energy polishing and protecting it. To more than one scientist who contemplated last week's apparently fruitless meeting...
Expanding Universe may be an illusion, have sought some other cause for the redshift in the spectrum. A decrease in Planck's constant h (energy of light multiplied by its vibration period) might be such a cause. Last year Britain's potent Theorist Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac suggested that the gravitational constant and certain others were dependent on t, the age of the universe, and were therefore slowly altering as the universe gets older. Last month in the Physical Review Mathematicians Samuel Sambursky and Max Schiffer of the Hebrew University in Palestine presented a detailed mathematical treatment...