I cannot resist posting this link to Paul Dirac’s
handwritten notes for his PhD thesis – the first ever written on quantum
mechanics: http://academia.edu/323246/PhD_Thesis_of_Paul_Dirac
.
It was launched into the twittersphere by Dirac’s biographer
Graham Farmelo (@grahamfarmelo).
Paul
Dirac was one of the great physicists of the twentieth century and this thesis
was one of his great contributions. The
Dirac Equation is one of the building blocks of modern physics and leads
directly to prediction of the existence of antimatter. In 1933, aged only
thirty-one, Dirac shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Erwin Schroëdinger “for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory”.
He was an interesting character: the Wikipedia entry on him is
worth a read.
