Werner Heisenberg

Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), German physicist and Nobel laureate, who developed a system of quantum mechanics, and whose indeterminacy, or uncertainty principle has had a profound influence on 20th-century physics and philosophy.

Heisenberg was born on December 5, 1901, in Würzburg and educated at the University of Munich. In 1923 he became an assistant to the German-British physicist Max Born at the University of Göttingen, and from 1924 to 1927 he held a Rockefeller Foundation grant to work with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr at the University of Copenhagen. In 1927 Heisenberg was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Leipzig. Subsequently he served as professor at the universities of Berlin (1941-1945), Göttingen (1946-1958), and Munich (1958-1976). In 1941 he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (renamed in 1946 the Max Planck Institute for Physics).

Heisenberg was in charge of scientific research in connection with the atomic-bomb project in Germany during World War II. Under his leadership, attempts were made to construct a pile in which the chain reaction would proceed so rapidly that it would produce an explosion, but these attempts were never realized. He was interned in England for a time after the war.

Heisenberg, one of the world's foremost theoretical physicists, made his major contributions in the theory of atomic structure. In 1925 he began to develop a form of quantum mechanics, called matrix mechanics, in which the mathematical formulation is based on the frequencies and amplitudes of the radiations absorbed and emitted by the atom, and on the energy levels of the atomic system (see Quantum Theory). Heisenberg's uncertainty principle played an important role in the development of quantum mechanics and also in the trend of modern philosophical thinking. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Physics. He died on February 1, 1976, in Munich. Among his many writings are The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory (1930), Cosmic Radiation (1946), Physics and Philosophy (1958), and Introduction to the Unified Theory of Elementary Particles (1967).