It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that
fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical
theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of
mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature
constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present
knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to
accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God
is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced
mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at
mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we
proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to
understand the universe better.- Paul Dirac.
Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation, which describes the behaviour of fermions and predicted the existence of antimatter. Dirac shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger, "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory". He also did work that forms the basis of modern attempts to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics.
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