Quantum Electronics Division
Europhysics news · 1990
hopeless task.Until 1982, when I met Piotr Kapitza who worked in Cambridge with Dirac, his close friend, at the Rutherford Laboratory.After the discovery of the Dirac equation, at every seminar no matter the topic, some one -often myself, Piotr Kapitza told me -asked: "Dirac, where is the antielec tron ?". Needless to say, a chorus of laughs closed the seminar.Paul Dirac eventually had had enough and decided to stop this.He knew that few col leagues were able to follow his arguments, and that even fewer had seriously studied his equation.Wanting to fool all these people, Dirac announced: "The proton has the opposite charge to that of the electron.So let us take the proton as a good candi date for being the antielectron."And so he started spreading the rumour that he was seriously considering the proton as the anti particle predicted by his equation.As for its mass, this was a detail that he was study ing.Laughing at the end of each seminar stopped as soon as the rumour circulated.No one any longer asked the question, "Dirac, where is the antielectron?".