"The fundamental laws necessary for the mathematical treatment of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty lies only in the fact that application of these laws leads to equations that are too complex to be solved"
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Dirac is doing something sly: declaring victory while quietly indicting our tools. In 1929, when quantum mechanics had just snapped into place, it was tempting to think the hard part of science was over. If the laws are "completely known" for much of physics and all of chemistry, then nature has handed us the rulebook; we simply lack the arithmetic stamina to read it at full speed. The line flatters the new quantum formalism with imperial confidence, then pivots to an almost bureaucratic frustration: the paperwork is impossible.
The subtext is that explanation and calculation aren’t the same achievement. Dirac’s "only" is a razor. It shrinks the remaining obstacles into a technicality, even though that "technicality" contains the entire problem of predicting real materials, reactions, proteins, and solids. The joke, if you hear it, is that the universe has been solved in principle but not in practice, a stance that both legitimizes quantum theory and sets the agenda for generations: approximation methods, perturbation theory, computational chemistry, density functional theory, and the whole industry of getting answers that are good enough.
Context sharpens the intent. Dirac is writing at the dawn of a new physics, when confidence was a cultural posture and reductionism looked like common sense. His sentence is a manifesto for a certain kind of scientific modernity: laws as elegant, solutions as messy, and progress as the art of taming complexity without pretending it isn’t there.
The subtext is that explanation and calculation aren’t the same achievement. Dirac’s "only" is a razor. It shrinks the remaining obstacles into a technicality, even though that "technicality" contains the entire problem of predicting real materials, reactions, proteins, and solids. The joke, if you hear it, is that the universe has been solved in principle but not in practice, a stance that both legitimizes quantum theory and sets the agenda for generations: approximation methods, perturbation theory, computational chemistry, density functional theory, and the whole industry of getting answers that are good enough.
Context sharpens the intent. Dirac is writing at the dawn of a new physics, when confidence was a cultural posture and reductionism looked like common sense. His sentence is a manifesto for a certain kind of scientific modernity: laws as elegant, solutions as messy, and progress as the art of taming complexity without pretending it isn’t there.
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| Topic | Science |
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