27: PAM Dirac, Mixmaster Extraordinaire

The preface to a small but most illuminating monograph on the life and work of Dirac (Pais, Jacob, Olive and Atiyah 1998) begins “Paul Adrien Maurice (PAM) Dirac was one of the founders of quantum mechanics and the author of many of its most important developments. He is numbered alongside Newton, Maxwell, Einstein and Rutherford as one of the greatest physicists of all time.” And, we might add, his equation, universally known as the Dirac equation marks a revolutionary milestone in the story of Quantum Mechanics (QM) for several remarkable reasons; not only does it unite QM with Special Relativity, but in the process it introduces the inevitable existence of antiparticles and illuminates the fundamental particle attribute of spin…