Related papers: Paul Dirac and the Pervasiveness of His Thinking
Credible reasons are presented to reveal that many of the lingering century old enigmas, surrounding the behavior of at least an individual quantum particle, can be comprehended in terms of an objectively real specific wave function. This…
In 1931, Dirac advanced a startling prediction about the existence of a new elementary particle, characterized by a magnetic charge of a single polarity: the magnetic monopole. This prediction, that was not based on experimental reasons but…
Paul A. M. Dirac has been undoubtedly one of the central figures of the last century physics, contributing in several and remarkable ways to the development of Quantum Mechanics (QM); he was also at the centre of an active community of…
Dirac showed that the existence of one magnetic pole in the universe could offer an explanation of the discrete nature of the electric charge. Magnetic poles appear naturally in most grand unified theories. Their discovery would be of…
In most introductory courses on electrodynamics, one is taught the electric charge is quantised but no theoretical explanation related to this law of nature is offered. Such an explanation is postponed to graduate courses on…
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…
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…
In J.D. Jackson's Classical Electrodynamics textbook, the analysis of Dirac's charge quantization condition in the presence of a magnetic monopole has a mathematical omission and an all too brief physical argument that might mislead some…
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 --…
The model of magnetic monopoles that was proposed by Paul Dirac in 1931 has long been a subject of theoretical interest in physics because of its potential to explain the quantization of electric charge. While much attention has been given…
Magnetic monopoles --- particles that behave as isolated north or south magnetic poles --- have been the subject of speculation since the first detailed observations of magnetism several hundred years ago. Numerous theoretical…
There are several mathematical and physical reasons why Dirac's quantization must hold. How far one can go without it remains an open problem. The present work outlines a few steps in this direction.
The Dirac method is used to analyze the classical and quantum dynamics of a particle constrained on a circle. The method of Lagrange multipliers is scrutinized, in particular in relation to the quantization procedure. Ordering problems are…
Several complications arise in quantum field theory because of the infinite many degrees of freedom. However, the distinction between one-particle and many-particle effects -- mainly induced by the vacuum -- is not clear up to now. A field…
Dirac in 1931 gave a beautiful argument for the quantization of electric charge, which required only the existence in the universe of one magnetic monopole, because gauge invariance of the interaction between the pole and any charge could…
According to Dirac's theory of the positron, an electromagnetic field tends to create pairs of particles which leads to a change of Maxwell's equations in the vacuum. These changes are calculated in the special case that no real electrons…
The author argues that the Dirac quantization condition might imply the existence of an undiscovered electromagnetic structure which governs the quantization of the electric charge and the quantization of the magnetic flux in the…
The Dirac monopole problem is studied in details within the framework of infinite-dimensional representations of the rotation group, and a consistent pointlike monopole theory with an arbitrary magnetic charge is deduced.
This colloquium summarizes Dirac's contributions to the discovery of quantum mechanics before he invented his relativistic wave equation.
An extension of the Dirac procedure for the quantization of constrained systems is necessary to address certain issues that are left open in Dirac's original proposal. These issues play an important role especially in the context of…