Subject: CCL: Dirac's famous statement

From: "Jens Spanget-Larsen" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 17:38:31 +0100

To the CCL community:

The following statement by the great British theoretician P. A. M. 
Dirac is frequently quoted in textbooks and papers:  

"The underlying physical laws necessary for the matematical theory of 
a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are ... completely 
known"

He should have made this statement in 1928 (or 1929), and, according 
to my notes, he should have continued: "The difficulty is only that 
the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too 
complicated to be soluble.  It therefore becomes desirable that 
approximate practical methods of applying quantum maechanics should 
be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features 
of atomic systems without too much computation"

I would like to read the original source of these interesting 
remarks, apparently made only some months after the birth of quantum 
mechanics.  But where did Dirac publish his famous statement?    

Yours, Jens >--<

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JENS SPANGET-LARSEN
Department of Chemistry              Phone:  +45 46757711
Roskilde University (RUC)            Fax:    +45 46757721 
POB 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark   E-Mail: [email-masked]
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From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 1996 10:17:19 -0600 (MDT)

Hi Jens,

I haven't looked up the original paper myself, but I found the quote
cited as P.A.M. Dirac, Proc.R.Soc.London Ser.A 123, 714 (1929). The
qote is now known as "Dirac's dictum". Appareantly, it is from a speech that
Dirac gave in Cambridge in 1929.
   The paragraph before the "dictum" is equally interesting, because
Dirac thought that the newly developed theory of relativistic quantum
mechanics would be of no importance for chemical applications.

Yours, Georg
--
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