Paul Dirac and the Pervasiveness of His Thinking

Abstract

I shall use a few personal reminiscences of my time as a student and colleague of Dirac in Cambridge to introduce some reflections on the nature of research in theoretical physics. I shall discuss and illustrate the approach of Dirac to his own research and the pervasiveness of the influence his example has provided. I shall discuss how ideas produced at all stages of his career have proved to be extraordinarily visionary, still motivating and exerting an influence on research many years after his death. Examples include his celebrated equation and prediction of the existence of antiparticles, the magnetic monopole and its quantisation condition, the quantum theory of dynamical systems with constraints and the membrane theory of the electron.