Related papers: How Dirac's Seminal Contributions Pave the Way for…
The Dirac equation is a cornerstone in the history of physics, merging successfully quantum mechanics with special relativity, providing a natural description of the electron spin and predicting the existence of anti-matter. Furthermore, it…
The Dirac equation has resided among the greatest successes of modern physics since its emergence as the first quantum mechanical theory fully compatible with special relativity. This compatibility ensures that the expectation value of the…
I shall use a few personal reminiscences of my time as a student and colleague of Dirac in Cambridge to introduce some reflections on the nature of research in theoretical physics. I shall discuss and illustrate the approach of Dirac to his…
The relativistic positive-energy wave equation proposed by P. Dirac in 1971 is an old but largely forgotten subject. The purpose of this note is to speculate that particles described by this equation (called here Dirac particles) are…
In 1927 the great physicist Paul A. M. Dirac failed to provide a consistent quantum description of the phase of a radiation field. Only one year later, he developed the famous Dirac theory of the electron, which led to the anti-particle --…
A rigorous \textit{ab initio} derivation of the (square of) Dirac's equation for a single particle with spin is presented. The general Hamilton-Jacobi equation for the particle expressed in terms of a background Weyl's conformal geometry is…
A recently proposed model of the Dirac electron, which describes observed properties of the particle correctly, is in the present paper shown to be also able to explain quantum interference by classical probabilities. According to this…
The year 2025 marked the centennial of quantum mechanics, inaugurated by Heisenberg's matrix formulation and the foundational contributions of Pauli, Schrodinger, and Dirac. Concurrently, 2026 marks the centennial of the Klein - Gordon…
By viewing the electron as a wavepacket in the positive energy spectrum of the Dirac equation, we are able to achieve a much clearer understanding of its behavior under weak electromagnetic fields. The intrinsic spin magnetic moment is…
This article is concerned with the role of fundamental principles in theoretical physics, especially quantum theory. The fundamental principles of relativity will be be addressed as well in view of their role in quantum electrodynamics and…
By a series of simple examples, we illustrate how the lack of mathematical concern can readily lead to surprising mathematical contradictions in wave mechanics. The basic mathematical notions allowing for a precise formulation of the theory…
Based on the results of F. Wilf on the need to take into account the quantum-mechanical correspondence rules in the Dirac equation for an electron, it was shown that the equation obtained by giving physical meaning to $\alpha$-Dirac…
Quantum physics, which describes the strange behavior of light and matter at the smallest scales, is one of the most successful descriptions of reality, yet it is notoriously inaccessible. Here we provide an approachable explanation of…
Through a very careful analysis of Dirac's 1932 paper on the Lagrangian in Quantum Mechanics as well as the second and third editions of his classic book {\it The Principles of Quantum Mechanics}, I show that Dirac's contributions to the…
In Westminster Abbey, in a nave near to Newton's monument, lies a memorial stone to Paul Dirac. The inscription on the stone includes the relativistic wave equation for an electron: the Dirac equation. At the turn of the 21st century, it…
A novel interpretation is given of Dirac's "wave equation for the relativistic electron" as a quantum-mechanical one-particle equation. In this interpretation the electron and the positron are merely the two different "topological spin"…
A system of two interacting protofields with generic parameters is unstable with respect to unceasing cycles of nonlinear squeeze (reduction) to randomly chosen centres and reverse extension which form the causally probabilistic process of…
A self-adjoint dynamical time operator is introduced in Dirac's relativistic formulation of quantum mechanics and shown to satisfy a commutation relation with the Hamiltonian analogous to that of the position and momentum operators. The…
Spin is a fundamental degree of freedom, whose existence was proven by Dirac for an electron by imposing the relativity to quantum mechanics, leading to the triumph to derive the Dirac equation. Spin of a photon should be linked to…
We recall Dirac's early proposals to develop a description of quantum phenomena in terms of a non-commutative algebra in which he suggested a way to construct what he called `quantum trajectories'. Generalising these ideas, we show how they…