I’m currently reading The Principles of Quantum Mechanics by P.A.M. Dirac, though I’m missing more than I’m getting. With a weak educational background and a lack of the toughness to dig in and learn how to learn on my own, I’d abandoned my physics major in college more than 30 years ago. I made up a lot of ground since then, but I can’t really recover those lost ‘windows of opportunity’ in my intellectual development. Literate in science in a general way, I’m not really so good in abstract mathematics that I can easily follow Dirac’s style of thought and presentation. Needing to beef up my detailed understanding of quantum mechanics, and a few other areas of specialized knowledge, I’d be better off in some ways with other books on my desk, such as the Dover reprint of Quantum Theory by David Bohm. I will get to that book soon enough, now that I’ve reset my priorities to emphasize again my studying and writing.
Why am I continuing to read Dirac’s book when I’m missing so much that I could catch a little better if I read a more concrete book first?
Reading Dirac on quantum mechanics is an aesthetic experience, but also an experience that helps to reshape the mind even when the content seems a little vague and beyond direct grasp. He writes a strangely abstract poetry rather than something to be found in a typical modern textbook. I suspect that much is slipping into the back of my mind while I’m wondering at the flow of symbols. That happens with certain poets: Herbert or Wordsworth or certainly Wallace Stevens. In fact, Stevens might be a good colleague for Dirac as would be the novelist Melville. Arguably, my style as a philosopher and theologian, and sometimes in my unpublished novels, is in that general category of abstract symbolization of concrete reality.
It was nearly ten years ago that I bought Dirac’s book. I read it partly way through at that time and wrote two novels not yet published, the first having as one of its characters a poet fascinated by the symbolism of Dirac’s formulation of quantum mechanics. I wrote several poems in the name of the Poet, whose ordinary name happened to be Dylan Shagari since he was half Welsh and half Nigerian. A book like The Principles of Quantum Mechanics can induce contemplative states in a sensitive reader. It can induce streams of imaginative thought rather than just filling the mind with material organized in the bureaucratic way of a textbook.
Dirac, by all testimonies, was a unique thinker, exploring physical reality by way of mathematical abstractions, as if he wanted to insulate himself from more concrete reality until he found something interesting which would lead him back by way of an insight — such as the possibility of anti-electrons or positrons which was said to arise in a session of what might be called ‘mathematical flow of consciousness’. Einstein, Heisenberg, and probably Newton constrained their thoughts in a different way to physical reality and then looked for the mathematics necessary to communicate and further develop their insights. Einstein and Heisenberg were said to dislike mathematics in and of itself. They were conventional novelists, Tolstoy or Eliot, looking at concrete reality to find characters and narrative streams. Dirac was Wordsworth, character and narrative were abstracted away to symbols, or maybe Melville using narrative styles to do what Wordsworth did with poetic styles.
Dirac’s book isn’t easy to read and I imagine I could have learned more, by most measurements, if I’d chosen to read Bohm’s book first, but I’m learning some deep truths from Dirac’s book, deep truths about the workings of the human mind and the odd ways in which our minds can be so well shaped to our world that some unusual thinkers can abstract away some aspects of that world, producing symbols that can be used to explore possibilities before returning to more explicit consideration of concrete reality.