Dirac Quotes

In his 1930 book, Dirac took for granted that measurements could be made, but was very vague about what was actually involved. (Willis Lamb)

When two identical He atoms collide... the interference is destructive. Particles that behave like He atoms are called fermions, short for "particles obeying Fermi–Dirac statistics." ...while bosons imitate one another... the "identity force" between fermions acts like a repulsion, and the probability of finding a fermion at some point in space is reduced if some of its identical siblings are nearby. ...It is the repulsive identity forces between electrons that support white dwarf stars... against their own gravity.

Frank Wilczek

Neither Dirac nor von Neumann discussed his measurements in physical terms.

Willis Lamb

There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet.

Wolfgang Pauli

One can see clearly some ambivalence in Dirac's attitudes... On the one hand, he has repeated many, many times his conviction that beauty in the fundamental equations of physics has priority... On the other hand... we see Dirac deeply involved with approximate calculations whose only purpose was to obtain an answer which the experimenters could rely upon.

Richard Dalitz

The Dirac notation, though originally applied to the propagation of single particles, also applies to describing the propagation of ensembles of coherent, or indistinguishable, photons.

F. J. Duarte

Regardless of the prophetic value of Dirac's description [on interference] his was probably the first discussion... including a coherent beam of light. In other words, Dirac wrote the first chapter in laser optics.

F. J. Duarte

If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet.

Wolfgang Pauli

I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science.

Niels Bohr

Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Born, Pauli, De Broglie, Dirac, the leading lights of the quantum revolution, are all there in that picture.

Manjit Kumar

Yes, yes, our friend Dirac has a religion, and its creed runs: "There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet." (Wolfgang Pauli)

I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.

Niels Bohr