Dirac theory

Last week Columbia University announced that two of its young scientists, Professor Willis Lamb, 34, and Robert Retherford, 35, had knocked a prop from under the Dirac theory.

The Dirac theory predicts, among many other things, that hydrogen atoms can exist in two different "states"�one stable, the other unstable�which contain the same amount of energy.

But Nobelman Rabi compared Lamb & Retherford's criticism of the Dirac theory with Einstein's modification of Newton's laws of motion.