Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice definition of Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice (dĭrăk`), 1902–84, English physicist. He was educated at the Univ. of Bristol and St. John's College, Cambridge, and became professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1932. In 1928, Dirac published a version of quantum mechanics that took into account the theory of relativity relativity, physical theory, introduced by Albert Einstein, that discards the concept of absolute motion and instead treats only relative motion between two systems or frames of reference.
..... Click the link for more information. (see quantum theory quantum theory, modern physical theory concerned with the emission and absorption of energy by matter and with the motion of material particles; the quantum theory and the theory of relativity together form the theoretical basis of modern physics.
..... Click the link for more information. ). One consequence of his theory was the prediction of negative energy states for the electron, implying the existence of an antiparticle antimatter, composed of atoms made up of antiprotons and antineutrons in a nucleus surrounded by positrons. A very simple type of "atom" incorporating antiparticles is positronium, a brief pairing of a positron and an electron that may occur before their annihilation.
..... Click the link for more information. to the electron; this antiparticle, the positron, was discovered in 1932 by C. D. Anderson. Dirac's equation for the motion of a particle is a relativistic modification of the Schrödinger wave equation, the basic equation of quantum mechanics. For their work Dirac and Erwin Schrödinger shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics. Dirac also received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1952 for this and other contributions to the quantum theory, including his formulation (with Enrico Fermi) of the Fermi-Dirac statistics and his work on the quantum theory of electromagnetic radiation. He wrote The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930, 4th ed. 1958).