Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (whilst not a household name) is considered by many to be the greatest British theorist since Sir Isaac Newton. All the great minds that pioneered atomic physics were left trailing by Dirac. When Einstein read a paper by the young Dirac, he said, I have trouble with Dirac – "this balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful..".
In 1925, for reasons only known to himself, he set out to unite the two most difficult and counter-initiative ideas in history – Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity (where as a fall out, objects behave differently as they travel at speeds approaching the speed of light). It must be remembered that by the late 1920’s quantum mechanics was consistently producing erroneous results for calculations describing electrons as they traveled at high speed.
As well as this, Dirac had an additional aim. Dirac had a much more esoteric motivation. He was once quoted of saying “a physical theory must have mathematical beauty”. For him, the fact that quantum mechanics and relativity weren’t reconciled was more that just an inconvenience – it was ugly.
Around 1925 he put his extra ordinary mind on the problem of bringing together the two new ideas of twentieth century physics. It is said that he worked on this problem alone for some three years before in 1928 he honed in on one mathematical formulation – an entirely new description of what goes on within the atom. Dirac knew it was right partly because it had mathematical beauty (see equation above).
As far as human achievements go it up there with Shakespeare's greatest works (something which by the way a very dear friend constantly reminds me of) and the Origin of the Species. Dirac’s equation describes how reality works at the fundamental level.
But, incredibly when Dirac looked at his own equation he noticed something that can only be said to be shocking. He later said, his equation [knew] more than he did.
In essence his equation was telling him that there is another universe that we had never noticed before. That’s because instead of his equation having one answer, it has two. The first describes the universe we know…the second describes a kind of mirror image to our universe made of atoms whose properties are reversed. As well as matter, Dirac’s equation predicts the existence of antimatter.
Dirac seems to be saying that for every piece of matter in our known universe, there can exist a corresponding piece of antimatter. Just like a world in a mirror a universe made of antimatter would look and work just like ours.
