David Custis Kimball - blog

I’m thinkin’ (not a tweet here) about (almost said a bot) like MIT envy

History

Am I repeating myself, well I can’t exactly remember (oops MTL deficit… or is that too catholic) about Paul A.M. Dirac? He grew up in a castle in Dirac, France. His noble birth led him to the Nobel prize in 1932. He proved that there was ANTI-matter. No, not that your Auntie mattered. She really doesn’t, except in that entangling matterwave sort of way … you know Helium is not just for gassing in high C.

Well back to PAM Dirac. He did have a fairly high voice, a little bald (as I remember him on that late afternoon in 1969. He gave a lecture (I have it on tape … but it screwed up and I need someone to retrieve it for me) (Not to sound desperate.) on the theory that AxB does not equal BxA in the real world. Well, you would think that the vector and matrix buffs would consider that a no brainer. Well he was concerned that as this communative property was being volated for the Electron, and what other properties were subject to reinterpretation with other particles like the neutron, proton, various quarks.

Now since most of the audience was from Pratt and Whitney… engineers - they offered some consolation as if all were part of a larger hole…. well ok. Paul was still a little depressed, but felt like someone was interested in figuring it out … and since he had won his prize some 37 years ago by proving that ANTIMATTER EXISTS, he may have retained a residual of physicist’s paranoia that that Antimatter was no Antie matter and it was out to zap him. Luckily he wasn’t from Chicago, if ya know what I mean, kapish?

So after this elegant poetic presentation on the mathematics of reality vectors and Psi this and Psi that … getting depressed and then uplifted by the practically intelligent questions of concerned engineers who were building jets that screamed at 50k rpm with a power that would nuke your socks black, Paul Dirac concluded feeling that he had contributed something.

He did make a BIG point early on that new ideas were like fetuses, fragile and needed all the positive encouragement available. New ideas are alone and subject to some magical order that we hope holds things together for this next idea … and by the way, life as we know it depends on it … mathematically.

PAM Dirac for those of you who don’t know, is the physicist’s Physicist. He was trained as an engineer in England, and then branched to the mathematical physics. A humble, kind man, who was with his wife and she as well - supporting him.

I was moved by his presentation and by the questions, and emboldened to present myself to ask him a question. That he was available was my fortune. I asked him, ‘what if time has mass?’ He smiled at me, and replied, ’ Just show it mathematically, and it will’. I will never forgot the smile. It comes so rarely from the recipient of a question, especially from academics being challenged.

I did realize later that this question was not mine alone. He had had the same, as he had written an extensive essay on the expanding universe and its affects on time, that of space being larger than before and time slowing. Time losing energy implies a loss of mass, but how much, or ? So we shared a question … just not the answer. He wins.

I haven’t followed this line of argument much since discovering his essay. I too smiled.
He left us as a visiting scholar at Florida State University, where he spent his last years.

Dirac … a durable rock… a true noble spirit that is if anything is: immortal. We connected in spirit and love of the same quest: life as a continuum of sensitivities.