Undergrad What inspired Dirac's formulation of quantum theory?

[victor94]

"historically the Heinsenberg equation of motion was first written by P. A. M Dirac, who - with his characteristic modesty- called it the Heinsenberg equation of motion."
Modern quantum mechanics/ J.J. Sakurai, page 84

Why dirac did that?, I didn't find any source.

Any information about this will be appreciated

 

[fresh_42]

Do you think of something like this:
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/introducing-qm-via-commutators.910860/#post-5737881

 

[dextercioby]

I will check Dirac's articles on QM from 1925 and 1926 to see if this is true. I don't have the 1930 (1st) Edition of his QM treatise, the book is so rare...:(

 

[vanhees71]

I think Dirac was inspired to his formulation of quantum theory in terms of what he then called "q-numbers" by reading Heisenberg's famous Helgoland article, which deeply impressed him. Nevertheless, I think Dirac's presentation of QT is the best of all the early papers on the subject. It's the way, I think, QT should be presented from the very beginning. It's easy for students who have heard a good lecture on Hamiltonian mechanics with Poisson brackets and some good portion of Lie-algebra theory coming naturally with it.