"Having lots of sex when you get older boosts brain power"

[AdamSmith]

The search for answers will continue. As a true scientist, more testing will be scheduled to examine the issue further. I'll let yall know when I publish my research.

 

:D

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. If we knew what we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?” Einstein

[AdamSmith]

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Einstein

[AdamSmith]

FLATOW: You know, because when you look, you know, you look - you thumb through science books of great scientist of that era…

 

Dr. FARMELO: Mm-hmm.

 

FLATOW: …you never see pictures of him in groups with people and stuff like that. He's always sort of missing from photos.

 

Dr. FARMELO: Well, I think that's true. He didn't like to be photographed. He was very, very retiring. But, you know, on set pieces, he liked to be in the action. When he went to the first big European meeting when he was a 20-odd-year-old, he made absolutely certain that he was standing right behind Einstein's right shoulder.

 

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113435529

[AdamSmith]

FLATOW: We're talking about Paul Dirac this hour on SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR News. I'm Ira Flatow talking with Graham Farmelo, author of "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom." Why mystic of the atom?

 

Dr. FARMELO: Well, he had this faith - you could really call it a faith - that if you had a beautiful mathematical equation, that it had a truth that you could extract from it. So when he set out his incredibly beautiful equation for the electron, that equation had problems. There's no doubt about it. He knew that. But he had tremendous faith, a mystical faith…

 

FLATOW: Mm-hmm.

 

Dr. FARMELO: …that if you stuck with that equation and worked at it, it would continue to yield fruit. So he had that kind of mystical approach to theoretical physics.

 

FLATOW: So he went from the mathematical side?

 

Dr. FARMELO: Yeah, very much so.

 

FLATOW: Yeah. He didn't have a theory. He had math and then tried to find a theory to fit the math? Would that be fair?

 

Dr. FARMELO: Yeah. Well, that's a pretty good way of summarizing it, yeah. I mean, Dirac was very mathematically minded. That is true. But he was actually trained as an engineer.

[AdamSmith]

Dr. FARMELO He had a very down-to-earth attitude. He wasn't in the game of physics to do just fancy mathematics. He wanted to set out the fundamental laws of nature in the most beautiful possible way in order to agree with experiment. His project was to set out those great laws of physics, just exactly the same as Einstein wanted to do.

 

FLATOW: But he never got the celebrity that Einstein did.

 

Dr. FARMELO: Oh, no. That's absolutely right. He didn't want it. He would actually pose as an ordinary member of the public when officials came looking for him, really. I mean, Heisenberg would actually - one of his colleagues in quantum physics would actually lie and say that he's nowhere to be seen, whereas Dirac was actually sitting behind the photographers, right?

 

FLATOW: Wow.

 

Dr. FARMELO: He just didn't want anything to do with it. You know, and part of the reason, you know, that Dirac wasn't famous is he had no great moment where a scientist is suddenly propelled into celebrity. I mean, Einstein had one in 1919. He was famous to his colleagues, but the public knew nothing about him. But then, it was arranged that there would be this great conflict between Einstein and Newton over the bending of starlight. And then overnight, Einstein became a world celebrity.

[AdamSmith]

Dr. FARMELO: Likewise, Hawking with his book - you know, he was not famous until his incredibly popular book came out, and then he was propelled onto the stage.

 

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. So he - so did he go lead his whole life unknown, but well-respected among his colleagues?

 

Dr. FARMELO: Oh, yeah. If I may say, well-respected is an understatement.

 

FLATOW: Yeah.

 

Dr. FARMELO: I mean, as I said, people like, you know, Richard Feynman and - these have gone on the records saying he was their hero. He was the person they looked up to.

[AdamSmith]

FLATOW: Mm-hmm. If - in 1933, he won the Nobel Prize. And as I said before, he was the youngest theoretician to do that. What did he actually win it for?

 

Dr. FARMELO: That's right. Well, he won it for his contributions to quantum mechanics. Now, quantum mechanics is the theory of the - roughly speaking - of the micro world. Newton's theories, that covers bridges and planets and things like that, that doesn't work when you try to use it right down at the atomic level. And quantum mechanics, which is the most revolutionary theory of the 20th century, was developed, discovered by a handful of physicists, one of whom was Paul Dirac.

 

Now, the Nobel Committee were actually quite slow to recognize - reward quantum mechanics because there was actually rather little evidence that it was correct, at least in the eyes of the conservatives who were running the Nobel Academy at that time. But Dirac had this fantastic success when he made his prediction of the anti-electron, the antiparticle of the electron. And it was - and then it was discovered in America in 1932. And that was such a success that they decided that he should be given the Nobel Prize in 1933.

[AdamSmith]

Dr. FARMELO: I mean, the key thing here, in my opinion, is that what Dirac believed more than anything else, right, is that beauty is the lodestar of fundamental theories of nature, that he really believed that fundamental theories advance from one to the next, each subsequent theory being more beautiful than the one that preceded it. This, to him, and I quote, was like a religion. He said at one point that for him, the beauty of the mathematical equations was more important than the agreement they give with experiment. Very controversial statement.

[AdamSmith]

Now, if you look at string theory now, if we take what the great practitioners of that theory are saying at face value, then it appears that, all right. There's no direct experimental evidence for that. That...

 

FLATOW: Yeah. Yeah.

 

Dr. FARMELO: …that's impossible to deny. But it's an enormously rich theory, a generalization of a theory that we know works well and has enormous potential. And Dirac, in my view, would be urging those theories to persist, persist with the - with what beauty is telling them, so to speak in - and have faith that eventually you will get agreement with experiment.

[AdamSmith]

DARCY (Caller): Hi. I was wondering, why wasn't he more recognized for his discovery of the anti-electron and other particles…

 

Dr. FARMELO: Well…

 

DARCY: …in modern society?

 

Dr. FARMELO: Yeah, yeah. I think that's a really good question. Just look at what that discovery is. I mean, Heisenberg, Dirac's friend and competitor, said that the discovery of the anti-electron, the first example of antimatter, was, in Heisenberg's view, perhaps the most important of all the leaps forward in 20th century physics. Just let's get this in perspective a second. Dirac, as I said, predicted on the basis of beautiful mathematics, not on the basis of experiment, that there should exist this stuff called antimatter.

 

FLATOW: Mm-hmm.

 

Dr. FARMELO: If you look at the theories of the early universe now, then at the very beginning of the universe, you have half matter, half antimatter. So, by that notion, Dirac conceived half the universe in his head. Unbelievable achievement.

 

FLATOW: That was a very Einsteinian sort of thing that...

 

Dr. FARMELO: Absolutely.

[AdamSmith]

I will say another thing, too, a very important thing, that although we talk about the discovery of antimatter as being a great drama, it was not seen like that at that time because Dirac's theory was seen as so way out, right, that people didn't actually take much notice of it. And it's only today that we've - if you like, we dramatize it in retrospect. So, you know, I think that's a big part of it, too.

[AdamSmith]

Dr. FARMELO: I was working - this summer, I was the director of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study. And I found out just recently that the biggest advance in quantum field theory in the last - in the 1990s, right, technically is called the Ads/CFT correspondence. Talking to the person that did that, Juan Maldacena, it turned out that the precursor of that paper was written in 1963 by Paul Dirac.

 

FLATOW: Wow.

 

Dr. FARMELO: So I was amazed. It wasn't even in the first edition of my book. I really hadn't realized it. So Dirac is still productive, still - his papers can still be read. Often people say, the more you read Dirac…

 

FLATOW: Right.

 

Dr. FARMELO: …the more you understand quantum mechanics.

[jawjateck]

My mind relishes recalling the exploits of my youth. Thanks for the memories, AS!

 

Oh, and Heisenberg was a drama boy. Fact check....very true! HAHAHA!

[TruHart1]

Suddenly, I feel like freaking EINSTEIN!

 

 

Where "Palying the Violin" = Masterbation (M) and as "X" approaches "infinity".....

 

X * M = "I'm a fucking GENIUS"

 

I always think of this:

 

TruHart1

[AdamSmith]

Dr. FARMELO: Well, I think that's true. He didn't like to be photographed. He was very, very retiring. But, you know, on set pieces, he liked to be in the action. When he went to the first big European meeting when he was a 20-odd-year-old, he made absolutely certain that he was standing right behind Einstein's right shoulder.

http://i44.tinypic.com/11sdp54.jpg

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

http://i.imgur.com/3WJVks0.jpg

[AdamSmith]

http://i-physics.weebly.com/uploads/4/4/2/5/44251847/3184665.png

[Boooner]

FWIW Planck, Bohr, and Rutherford were striking in their youth too.

 

Never get old