The Moral Vision
Going Places on Home Ground
~ 189 ~
1925, Dirac independently went to work on creating an
appropriate new mathematics for handling it. The
result was his p-q number theory, completed in 1928, a
“highly original and extremely elegant mathematical
technique” in which “he showed how the theories of
quantummechanics and relativity could be combined.”
In 1930 he published his textbook of quantum
mechanics, which immediately became a classic. In
1932, at the incredibly early age of 30, he was appointed
Lucrasian professor of Mathematics at Cambridge
University, the chair Sir Isaac Newton had once
occupied—a fitting post for one whom Niels Bohr
called “the most remarkable scientific mind since
Newton.”
Dirac was not successful in electrical engineering,
but when he entered his own domain—
mathematics—he thrived and showed amazingly
innovative genius. Like Dirac, everyone has a
domain of his own in which he can excel. Failure in
one field is no reason to lose hope: there is always
another field awaiting one, in which the flower of
one’s destiny can flourish and thrive.
