Werner Heisenberg

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Werner Heisenberg
Heisenberg in 1933
Born	Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-12-05)5 December 1901 Würzburg, Kingdom of Bavaria, German Empire
Died	1 February 1976(1976-02-01) (aged 74) Munich, Bavaria, West Germany
Resting place	Munich Waldfriedhof
Nationality	German
Alma mater	University of Munich University of Göttingen
Known for	Uncertainty principle Heisenberg cut Heisenberg's entryway to matrix mechanics Heisenberg ferromagnet Heisenberg group Heisenberg limit Heisenberg's microscope Heisenberg model (classical) Heisenberg model (quantum) Heisenberg picture Isospin Matrix mechanics Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangian Kramers-Heisenberg formula Bootstrap model C*-algebra Exchange interaction Mott problem Heisenberg–Langevin equations Quantum fluctuation Resonance (chemistry) S-matrix S-matrix theory Proton–neutron model of the nucleus Uranprojekt
Spouse	Elisabeth Schumacher (m. 1937)
Children	7 (incl. Jochen and Martin)
Awards	Matteucci Medal (1929) Barnard Medal for Meritorious Service to Science (1930) Nobel Prize in Physics (1932) Max Planck Medal (1933) Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1955) Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences (1961)
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical physics
Institutions	University of Göttingen University of Copenhagen University of Leipzig University of Berlin University of Munich
Thesis	On stability and turbulence of liquid flows (1923)
Doctoral advisor	Arnold Sommerfeld
Other academic advisors	Niels Bohr Max Born
Doctoral students	Felix Bloch Edward Teller Rudolf E. Peierls Reinhard Oehme Friedwardt Winterberg Peter Mittelstaedt Șerban Țițeica Ivan Supek Erich Bagge Hermann Arthur Jahn Heimo Dolch Hans Heinrich Euler Edwin Gora Bernhard Kockel Arnold Siegert Wang Foh-san Karl Ott Bary F. Malik
Other notable students	William Vermillion Houston Guido Beck Ugo Fano Ettore Majorana Herbert Wagner
Influenced	Robert Döpel Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker
Signature

Werner Karl Heisenberg (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German physicist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of quantum mechanics. He discovered the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which shows there is a limit on how well position and velocity of a particle can be measured.

Early life

Heisenberg was born in Wuerzburg, Germany, the son of a professor of Byzantine history. He went to university to study physics in Munich. Arnold Sommerfeld was one of his teachers.

Heisenberg was a very good student and needed only three years to finish his studies. He then wrote a doctoral thesis about movements in the flows of liquids ("Über Stabilität und Turbulenz von Flüssigkeitsströmen"—"On the stability and turbulence of liquid streams"). In 1924 he became assistant to Max Born at the University of Göttingen. In June 1925 he was recovering from hay fever on the island Helgoland, and while working alone made the decisive breakthrough to Quantum mechanics. Back in Göttingen, together with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, they wrote the basic paper which founded Quantum

mechanics.

In 1926/ 1927 Heisenberg worked with Niels Bohr at the University of Copenhagen. In February 1927, while Bohr was on extended skiing holidays, he invented the uncertainty principle and published the paper “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik”—“On the Visualizable Contents of the Quantum-theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics”.

At the age of 26 Heisenberg became professor of theoretical physics at the University of Leipzig.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize when he was 31 years old.

In 1937 he married Elisabeth Schumacher. They had seven children, one of their sons is well known as a neurobiologist and geneticist, Martin Heisenberg.

War and later

During the Second World War, from 1939 to 1945 Werner Heisenberg was drafted to work on the German Uranium Project . This was aiming at a nuclear reactor, and did not result in any nuclear weapons, possibly because Heisenberg did not want it to. Some historians assume that there was a race between the tiny German Uranium project and the huge American Manhattan project. Hans A. Bethe, the director of the theory division of the Manhattan project at Los Alamos, said this was not true. Edward Teller, the father of the American hydrogen bomb, said that Heisenberg sabotaged the German project.

After the war, he was held as a prisoner at Farm Hall in England from May 1945 to January, 1946, where the British and Americans kept ten German nuclear scientists.

Later he worked in elementary particle physics, mainly in West Germany and he helped the foundation of the European Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. In April 1957, he signed a declaration , together with 17 German physicists, that they would never participate in the construction of nuclear weapons. In 1958, his Max-Planck-Institut für Physik was transferred from Göttingen to München.

He died in Munich Germany, in 1976 at the age of 74.