DIRAC · The Hole That Moves — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

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TEE-SCI-CN-DIR-02-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

DIRAC · The Hole That Moves Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

Dirac's 1928 equation demanded negative energies; in 1930 he proposed a sea full of them where a hole behaves like a particle of opposite charge. Printed here is that sea and its hole in motion.

A Author

Paul Dirac

B Subject

Theoretical Physics

C Aesthetic

Diagram · Typographic

Exploration

The 1928 equation admitted negative energies and Dirac did not cross them out. He supposed a sea of negative states already occupied, where a hole moves like a particle of the opposite charge.

Anderson photographed that particle in 1932 in a cloud chamber. The sea was abandoned afterwards; the hole stayed.

Today antimatter is a clinical procedure. In a positron emission tomography a labelled sugar is injected, each positron travels barely a millimetre, collides with an electron and both vanish into two photons that leave in opposite directions.

The apparatus does not measure the positron: it measures those two photons arriving at the same time on opposite sides of the ring, and from there deduces the line where the encounter occurred.

An image of the metabolism of a living body is built on the annihilation of matter, several million times per session.

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