| The Bristol-born physicist Paul Dirac was one of the most influential scientists of the twentieth century , writes Peter Rodgers, editor of Physics World . Dirac made many crucial contributions to quantum mechanics, the theory which describes the world on very small scales, and shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics "for the discovery of new and productive forms of atomic theory". Dirac's career Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born at 15 Monk Road in Bishopston, Bristol, UK, on 8 August 1902. His father was from Switzerland and taught French at the Merchant Venturers' Technical College in Bristol. His mother was from Cornwall. The young Dirac was educated at the Bishop Road Elementary School and the secondary school of the Merchant Venturers', which later became Cotham Grammar School. In 1918 he entered Bristol University, where he graduated with first-class honours in electrical engineering in 1921. Fascinated by Einstein's theories of relativity, but unable to take up a scholarship at Cambridge University for financial reasons, he stayed at Bristol and graduated in mathematics, again with first-class honours, in 1923. Dirac then moved to St John's College, Cambridge, to do research in theoretical physics under the supervision of Ralph (RH) Fowler of the Cavendish Laboratory. Within a few years Dirac had completed in his Nobel Prize work. In 1932 he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, the post once held by Sir Isaac Newton and today by Stephen Hawking. | |
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