The man who broke Einstein…
🔬 My inspiration: The man who broke Einstein.
In 1928 a British physicist named Paul Dirac accomplished something unique in the history of science.
He wrote an equation that reconciled quantum mechanics with special relativity.
But there was one problem…
⚡ It broke Einstein’s more sacred equation, E=mc².
Dirac was faced with a decision: abandon his most valuable accomplishment or redefine the universe.
He chose the latter.
This is his story, and what inspired me to create Antimatter Consulting.
📘 Humble beginnings
Dirac came from a poor family.
His father, Charles, was a French teacher and his mother was a librarian.
In the aftermath of WWI, the family was destitute. Charles was a strict disciplinarian, cold and distant. He only allowed the family to speak French at home and wouldn’t respond to English. Academic perfection was expected in the family. The resulting anxiety and depression caused Paul’s brother Felix to take his own life at the age of 22 while studying at Cambridge. Paul collapsed even deeper into himself, awkward, extremely quiet.
⚔️ The conflict
At 26, Paul conceived of his unifying equation for quantum mechanics and special relativity, now known as the “Dirac Equation.” But his theory broke one of Einstein’s most fundamental axioms.
Einstein had connected matter and energy.
💥 Energy equals matter times the speed of light squared.
According to Einstein all matter and energy were always positive. This is common sense, right? How could something have a negative amount of matter??
But in order to successfully predict the behavior of electrons, Dirac’s equation demanded negative values for both matter and energy. According to the gospel of the times, this made absolutely no sense.
🎯 The decision
Einstein was a hero to Dirac, so the initial implications of his equation were deeply troubling. He explored every possibility. Was it a flaw in his calculations? Or just a mathematical oddity with no physical manifestation? He eventually ruled these out. There had to be actual negative matter - antimatter - in the real world!
That’s when Paul made his stand.
“It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment,” he proclaimed as he brought his position public.
The scientific community, Einstein himself included, rejected his theory.
🏆 Vindication
Decades later, in 1955, scientists at UC Berkeley created an actual antiproton in a particle accelerator. It was the ultimate vindication of Dirac’s theory - a real life isolated piece of antimatter!
Today, antimatter is used every day. If you’ve ever had a PET scan, you’ve had antimatter injected into your body! Small tracer amounts of positrons collide with the electrons in your body, annihilating each other and producing gamma rays that are detected by a PET scanner.
🚀 Inspiration
That moment, the choice to adopt a radical truth, is what inspired me to create Antimatter Consulting. Dirac’s rejection of limits, his belief that his creativity could literally change the universe, is now our credo.
No, we’re not rewriting physics.
But we are helping companies reject assumptions, overcome limits, and chart new directions.
💡 We help founders and teams rethink their Product Strategy.
We build positioning, then roll up our sleeves to deliver sales automation, marketing tools, and AI-powered outreach to get that message out to the world.
Let’s rewrite expectations together: