Dirac's Principles of Quantum Mechanics

[FEYNMAN, Richard (1918-1988)]. DIRAC, Paul (1902-1984). The Principles of Quantum Mechanics . Second edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935. "The last sentence of the book of Dirac I can still remember, 'It seems that some essentially new physical ideas are here needed.' So, I had this as a challenge and an inspiration." Richard Feynman on Dirac's Principles of Quantum Mechanics Feynman's copy of Dirac, with his ownership inscription to the front endpaper and annotations that give a valuable glimpse into the beginnings of his Nobel prize-winning work. Feynman idolized Dirac, whose magnum opus was first published in 1930, when Feynman was aged 12. This copy is the second edition, which appeared in 1935, when he was 17. In his Nobel lecture, Feynman would state: "The beginning of the thing was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when I was an undergraduate student reading about the known physics, learning slowly about all these things that people were worrying about, and realizing ultimately that the fundamental problem of the day was that the quantum theory of electricity and magnetism was not completely satisfactory. This I gathered from books like those of Heitler and Dirac. I was inspired by the remarks in these books; not by the parts in which everything was proved and demonstrated carefully and calculated, because I couldn’t understand those very well. At the young age what I could understand were the remarks about the fact that this doesn’t make any sense, and the last sentence of the book of Dirac I can still remember, 'It seems that some essentially new physical ideas are here needed'" (Feynman, "The Development of the Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics," Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1965). Octavo. Original navy cloth, spine stamped in gilt (spine slightly toned, some rippling/abrading to cloth, hinges cracked). Custom clamshell box.

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