Status Updates From Lectures on Quantum Mechanics

Still in the “if you say so” mode of receiving information I’m now convinced that, by the time of the lecture Dirac was one of the few people in the world who could say so, perhaps a handful of attendee by the end of all four of them who would know a bit more about this Hamiltonian Method, probably more who never thought about it for the rest of their careers. I can only hope that I have enough smarts for the latter.

Who were the audience for Dirac’s lectures, and what was going on in their minds as they listened to him speak? I ask this question quite a bit, but I am curious to know if there were a few hold-outs in the crowd thinking variations on “So you say, if curved space was in fact real” or “I cannot accept that there is a new way to calculate Lagrangian.” Doubt is wide-spread but will always move science forward.

Feeling very left behind, I can only hope all these equations are leading somewhere while Dirac presses on. I’m not even sure what he is trying to measure or prove: particles have a certain velocity or that quantum mechanics in general works? At least someone somewhere from the world’s second biggest landmass got enough of it to publish Dirac’s article in the Canadian Journal of Mathematics that he mentions.

More than a couple quantum theory authors have written about Dirac’s eloquence when solving the incalculable but his first lecture on Hamiltonian (who?) equations is a bit too direct. One can picture him pounding out the formulae onto the chalkboard, almost as if the colloquial expression ‘mind your p’s and q’s’ was dedicated to him. He’d probably point out that it’s q’s and p’s, moving on to Greek.