Eli5 what is a dirac sea????
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You labelled this economics, but I assume that was a mistake and you meant to label it physics, since I haven’t heard of a Dirac sea in economics.
Anyway, the Dirac equation was one of the first successful attempts at making an equation that describes particles taking into account both quantum mechanics and special relativity. It did a lot of thing well, but there was one major problem: for every state with energy E, there was a state with energy -E.
This was a huge problem, because physical systems always want to be in the lowest energy state. But, because of the reason above, the is *no* lowest energy state (since there is no smallest real number), so going off of this reasoning, an electron will continuously emit radiation, as it forever goes lower and lower in energy.
The way that Dirac solved this is that he created what is called the Dirac sea. This relies on what is called the Pauli Exclusion Principle, which says that no two of the same type of particles can be in the same state (you may remember it from filling out the structure of atoms in high school chemistry). His idea was that what we call the “vacuum” is actually an infinite number of elections that are filling up all the negative energy states, that we call the Dirac sea, meaning that for the elections that we measure, they cannot go below zero.
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