QUANTUM MECHANICS

Every day we need to surrender to beauty—some kind of beauty; for some it is mountains, lakes and trees and for others it is quantum mechanics as it relates to equations that predict the existence of antimatter. One such person, Paul Dirac, the great physicist, who in 1920’s-30’s came up with mathematical equations that were so new and advanced that by age 23 he was considered one of the fathers of quantum mechanics. He decided that in particle physics, antimatter is the extension of the concept of the antiparticle to matter; where antimatter is composed of antiparticles in the same way that normal matter is composed of particles. Hey, hey, whatever. Why is a 23 year old dealing with such things anyway? He should be out working on a cattle ranch and drinking beer…you know, something important.

This dude was seeing serious stuff at a very young age; at 24 he received a doctorate from Cambridge; at 34 he received a Nobel Prize in Physics, and in his latter years it was written of him, “Dirac thought words were treacherous and saw merit only in mathematics. For him, equations were beautiful. As he aged, he grew more certain that beauty was a guide to truth. His view that fundamental physics could be gleaned from elegant mathematics now permeates a field of inquiry into the reality of nature—string theory. (Hey, whatever, look it up).” (The Economist, January 2009).

Here is the key: “That beauty is the guide to truth.” We too will find our truth as we find Beauty. Get to lookin’, pilgrim.

“Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” Jesus