Werner Heisenberg, crouching,  on an outing with his brother and parents, ca. 1910.

Wenrner Heisenberg was born on December 5, 1901 in Wurzberg in the southern German state of Bavaria. He was born to Dr. August Heisenberg and Anna Heisenberg. August was a professor of middle and modern Greek philology at the University of Munich. Mrs. Heisenberg was the daughter of a Gymnasium principle and she was an authority on Greek tragedy. Werner had a older brother named Erwin. He later became a chemist. The Heisenberg were an academic family. They were considered well off financially.

 

Heisenberg got his doctorate from the University of Munich in 1923. He got it in a record time of three years. In 1927 he was appointed professor of theoretical physics in Leipzig at the age of 25 --Germany's youngest full professor. From the time he entered the university in Munich until his appointment as professor in Leipzig, Heisenberg studied and trained in three of the world's leading centers for theoretical atomic physics: Munich, Göttingen, and Copenhagen.  He studied with three of the world's leading atomic theorists: Sommerfeld, Max Born, and Niels Bohr. In Munich Heisenberg also began a life-long friendship with Wolfgang Pauli, an equally brilliant young physicist whose extensive conformity with Heisenberg and others is one of the cultural treasures of the 20th century.

Heisenberg in Göttingen, 1924

 

Arnold Sommerfeld (left) and Niels Bohr, two of the physics professors who most influenced Heisenberg, in 1919.

Heisenberg made a lot of contributions to physics, but he made two were major. The first one is a new quantum theory. Heisenberg forced the admission that electrons couldn't be individually measured with certainty. Not that long after he developed matrix mechanics.  An Austrian physicist Erwin Schrodinger proposed another model. It was called wave mechanics. They were later shown to be mathematically equal even though one theory characterized the electron as a particle and the other as a wave. His second contribution to Physics was his uncertainty principle. The principle says that it is impossible to calculate with perfect accuracy the position and momentum of a subatomic particle. The principle gave full credit to an idea that had been in the physics world for several years: that the ordinary language cannot describe the atom. The atom can only be measured and in these measurements is built inherent uncertainty because of limitations of human perception.  With the help of Erwin Schrodinger and Paul Dirac, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for the year 1932, in 1933. On April 29, 1937 he married Elisabeth Schumacher in Berlin .In January 1938 Elisabeth gave birth to twins, the first of seven children.

 

Bohr and Einstein during one of their discussions about quantum physics

The objections of Einstein and others notwithstanding to his quantum theory, Bohr, Heisenberg and their colleagues managed to ensure the acceptance of their view by the most of physicists at that time. They did this by presenting the new explanation on lecture trips around the world and by showing that it worked. The successes of the theory naturally attracted many of the best students to institutes such as Heisenberg's, some coming from as far away as America, India, and Japan. These bright students, educated by the Copenhagen doctrine and educated into the new quantum mechanics, formed a new and dominant generation of physicists. Those in Germany and Central Europe carried the new ideas with them as they moved around the world during the 1930s and 1940s in the stir of Hitler's rise to power in Germany. In 1939, Heisenberg was already drafted into a reserve mountain infantry unit With the outbreak of war he and other physicists received military orders, not to the front, but to the Army Weapons Bureau (Heereswaffenamt) in Berlin. Here they were asked to explore the scape for the useful application of a new discovery: nuclear fission. Nuclear fission involved the splitting of nuclei with the release of enormous amounts of energy. Under the right factor, the fission process in uranium can be controlled, leading to a heat producing reactor that can be coupled to the production of electricity. In other factors if the reaction is uncontrolled, the energy is released extremely quickly, producing an enormous explosion--an atomic bomb.

 

In 1942 he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin . Here he worked on nuclear fission and headed Hitler’s uranium project. In 1946 he returned to Germany and was named director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Gottingen. In 1920 he resigned his position at Kaiser. Six years later on February 1, 1976 Werner died at his home in Munich of cancer. In his old age, he became knowledgeable with particle physics and worked on a version of a unified field theory. However at the end of his life he went back to the Platonism he learned when he was young, the fused legacy of his family and education.

Cassidy, David C., W. Heisenberg(1901-1976). May 2002, 17 November 2003
 <  http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/po2htm >.
 

“Heisenberg Representation.” Scientific Encyclopedia Eighth Edition. 1995 ed.

“Werner Heisenberg.” Simmons, John. The Scientific 100. 1996ed.