Quantum Mechanics by Jim Al-Khalili

Author:Jim Al-Khalili
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405929448
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-11-27T16:00:00+00:00

Our Sun is only hot enough to fuse hydrogen to form helium and a few other light elements. More massive stars can make heavier elements like lead and gold when they explode in a supernova.

Dirac and antimatter

In a recent poll, the Englishman Paul Dirac was voted the fifth greatest physicist of all time, after Newton, Einstein, Maxwell and Galileo, which gives you some idea of the high regard in which this unsung hero is held in science.

Dirac was a shy man who was often more concerned with the elegance of his mathematics than the results of experiments. He once said:

I think it’s a peculiarity of myself that I like to play about with equations, just looking for beautiful mathematical relations which maybe don’t have any physical meaning at all. Sometimes they do.

He showed that the two different ways of describing the quantum world, due to Heisenberg and Schrödinger, were equivalent, and went on to modify quantum mechanics to take into account particles moving at close to the speed of light. He had to invent a new equation that now bears his name.

The Dirac equation famously predicted the existence of antimatter. Today, we know that for every matter particle there can exist its antimatter counterpart, but if a particle and its antiparticle come into contact they will annihilate in a burst of pure energy. However, the notion of an antimatter bomb is still very much science fiction, so don’t worry. The process of matter-antimatter annihilation can also happen in reverse, whereby a quantum of energy, such as a photon of light, can be converted into a pair of particles, such as an electron and its antimatter partner, a positron.

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