We are writing what will function as chapters in a history book of the topic "Nobel Prize Winning Science Deniers".  This book will be used as a text in a general education science course that seeks to identify the reasons that even the most knowledgeable people in science can allow personal bias to influence their thoughts and cause them to make scientific mistakes.  We hope to learn to avoid those pitfalls in our own thought.  Paul Dirac was one of the greatest minds of the early and middle twentieth century and was the first to merge quantum mechanics with special relativity, creating the field we call quantum electrodynamics.  But his early work left some of the mathematics of that field incomplete.  When Richard Feynman later advanced that work achieving mathematical theory that matched experiment much better than Dirac’s work, Dirac would not accept Feynman’s work as legitimate because he found the math to be inelegant and believed that any real theory of the universe must be mathematically elegant.

Nobel-prize-winning science deniers: Paul Dirac

2019 Spring National Meeting

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