Paul A. M. Dirac

Before I received my PhD degree in 1961, I had to study Dirac's bra and ket vectors, the Dirac equation and Dirac matrices, positrons, Fermi-Dirac statistics, and Dirac neutrinos.

Perhaps not many of you know about Sections on "permutations as dynamical variables" in his book "Principles of Quantum Mechanics." I studied these sections very thoroughly in 1958, and was able to correct an error in the 1971 paper of Feynman et al. You may be interested in my Chaucer page.

In 1962, I came to the University of Maryland as an assistant professor. At that time, the physics world was confused, and was dominated by the so-called "bandwagoners." You should join the bandwagon. Otherwise your job is in jeopardy. Every young physicist was led to believe that physics comes from complex planes. Everybody had to work on Regge poles, bootstraps, and N/D methods. I did not like this environment.

In the fall of 1962, Paul A. M. Dirac visited the University of Maryland, and I had to provide convenience to him. I had an opportunity to spend about thirty minutes with him without anyone else. I asked him what he thought about the trend in American physics.

Nicodemus made a secret visit to Jesus in order to find out about himself. He did not like the society to which he belonged and was seeking a new wisdom. From Jesus, Nicodemus got a totally un-expected answer.

I was like Nicodemus, and I got an answer having nothing to do with Regge poles and bootstraps. Dirac told me American physicists should study more about Lorentz transformations and Lorentz covariance. I followed Dirac, and this is the reason why I still enjoy having quarrels with referees. I published my first paper in 1961. I hope to celebrate the fiftieth year of my active research life in 2011, thanks to Paul A. M. Dirac.

I was able to appreciate what Dirac told me because I had made several attempts to understand Wigner's 1939 paper on representations of the inhomogeneity Lorentz group when I was a graduate student. In 1963-65, Steven Weinberg was publishing his papers on Wigner's little groups actively, but I could not join his bandwagon because I was not prepared. Instead I had to continue my research on "bootstrap dynamics." In in 1965, I found out how laughable it was.

In 1970, Richard Feynman gave a talk at the APS spring meeting held in Washington, DC. He showed that the so-called Chew-Fratuschi plot was nothing more than a manifestation of the degeneracy of three-dimensional harmonic oscillator. The Chew-Frautschi plot was the basis for the Regge-pole theory.

In 1971, Feynman published his talk in Physical Review D with his students. They wanted to present their work in a Lorentz-covariant manner, but there were many soft spots. Indeed, Dirac was right when he was talking to me in October of 1962. When he talked to me three months after he had a meeting with Feynman in Poland. Dirac said "American physicists should -- ," instead "You should..." Dirac could have talked about Feynman when he was commenting on American physicists.

Since then I started rewriting Feynman's 1971 paper using a correct language of the Lorentz group. With Marilyn Noz, I wrote published my first paper on this subject in 1973.

Since then, I published many papers, and here is one of my latest papers.

I also wrote many stories about Dirac. Among them are

1. Heisenberg and Dirac. How are they different?
2. Lorentz Covariance. Dirac introduced the light-cone coordinate system. The Lorentz boost is a squeeze transformation.
3. Wigner's brother-in-law. Dirac married Wigner's younger sister.
4. Lorentz and Dirac on Lorentz transformations.
5. Dirac's polarized neutrinos.
6. Dirac's Squeezed States.
7. Dirac, Feynman, and their Harmonic Oscillators.
8. Chaucer, Dirac, and Feynman on permutations.
• Click here for other interesting stories, including those about Feynman.