2020-02-26
10:15 at HCP F 43.4

Dirac's geometrical path to his electron equation

Tom Pashby

University of Chicago, United States

Until now, historians relying on Dirac's published accounts of his discovery of the equation have not appreciated the importance of his geometrical understanding of space and time since Dirac presented his relativistic electron equation as resulting from an algebraic trick. A careful interpretation of newly discovered manuscripts reveal that Dirac was led to his pathbreaking and celebrated equation by ''thinking geometrically''. I argue that Dirac had an early appreciation of the geometrical interpretation of spinors in terms of projective geometry, which has its origin in Felix Klein's lectures on the spinning top.