Article ID: CBB062454778

A Beautiful Sea: P. A. M. Dirac's Epistemology and Ontology of the Vacuum (2016)

unapi

This paper charts P.A.M. Dirac's development of his theory of the electron, and its radical picture of empty space as an almost-full plenum. Dirac's Quantum Electrodynamics famously accomplished more than the unification of special relativity and quantum mechanics. It also accounted for the ‘duplexity phenomena’ of spectral line splitting that we now attribute to electron spin. But the extra mathematical terms that allowed for spin were not alone, and this paper charts Dirac's struggle to ignore or account for them as a sea of strange, negative-energy, particles with positive ‘holes’. This work was not done in solitude, but rather in exchanges with Dirac's correspondence network. This social context for Dirac’s work contests his image as a lone genius, and documents a community wrestling with the ontological consequences of their work. Unification, consistency, causality, and community are common factors in explanations in the history of physics. This paper argues on the basis of materials in Dirac's archive that --- in addition --- mathematical beauty was an epistemological factor in the development of the electron and hole theory. In fact, if we believe that Dirac's beautiful mathematics captures something of the world, then there is both an epistemology and an ontology of mathematical beauty.

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Authors & Contributors
Emmet P. Harrington
Di Mauro, Marco
Kessenikh, Alexandr Vladimirovich
Rogers, David M.
Nándori, I.
Jentschura, U. D.
Concepts
Physics
Quantum mechanics
Electrons
Electrodynamics
Philosophy of science
Atomic, nuclear, and particle physics
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
20th century, early
Places
England
Russia
Italy
Germany
Great Britain
Institutions
Florida State University
University of Bristol
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