91 Facts About Werner Heisenberg

Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics.

Werner Heisenberg published his work in 1925 in a major breakthrough paper.

Werner Heisenberg is known for the uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927.

Werner Heisenberg made contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles.

Werner Heisenberg was a principal scientist in the German nuclear weapons program during World War II.

Werner Heisenberg was instrumental in planning the first West German nuclear reactor at Karlsruhe, together with a research reactor in Munich, in 1957.

Werner Heisenberg was director of the institute until it was moved to Munich in 1958.

Werner Heisenberg then became director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics from 1960 to 1970.

Werner Heisenberg was president of the German Research Council, chairman of the Commission for Atomic Physics, chairman of the Nuclear Physics Working Group, and president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Werner Heisenberg's father was a secondary school teacher of classical languages who became Germany's only ordentlicher Professor of medieval and modern Greek studies in the university system.

Werner Heisenberg recounted philosophical conversations with his fellow students and teachers about understanding the atom while receiving his scientific training in Munich, Gottingen and Copenhagen.

Werner Heisenberg later stated that "My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing".

In 1919 Werner Heisenberg arrived in Munich as a member of the Freikorps to fight the Bavarian Soviet Republic established a year earlier.

Werner Heisenberg received his doctorate in 1923 at Munich under Sommerfeld.

In June 1922, Sommerfeld took Werner Heisenberg to Gottingen to attend the Bohr Festival, because Sommerfeld had a sincere interest in his students and knew of Werner Heisenberg's interest in Niels Bohr's theories on atomic physics.

At the event, Bohr was a guest lecturer and gave a series of comprehensive lectures on quantum atomic physics and Werner Heisenberg met Bohr for the first time, which had a lasting effect on him.

Werner Heisenberg briefly returned to this topic after World War II.

In January 1937, Werner Heisenberg met Elisabeth Schumacher at a private music recital.

From 1924 to 1927, Werner Heisenberg was a Privatdozent at Gottingen, meaning he was qualified to teach and examine independently, without having a chair.

From 17 September 1924 to 1 May 1925, under an International Education Board Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, Werner Heisenberg went to do research with Niels Bohr, director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen.

Werner Heisenberg returned to Gottingen and, with Max Born and Pascual Jordan over a period of about six months, developed the matrix mechanics formulation of quantum mechanics.

On 1 May 1926, Werner Heisenberg began his appointment as a university lecturer and assistant to Bohr in Copenhagen.

In 1927, Werner Heisenberg was appointed ordentlicher Professor of theoretical physics and head of the department of physics at the University of Leipzig; he gave his inaugural lecture there on 1 February 1928.

Also in 1929, Werner Heisenberg went on a lecture tour of China, Japan, India, and the United States.

Werner Heisenberg's thinking on Dirac's theory and further development of the theory were set forth in two papers.

Werner Heisenberg's paper establishing quantum mechanics has puzzled physicists and historians.

Werner Heisenberg's methods assume that the reader is familiar with Kramers-Heisenberg transition probability calculations.

The method proved too difficult to immediately apply to realistic problems, so Werner Heisenberg turned to a simpler example, the anharmonic oscillator.

Werner Heisenberg solved for the quantum behavior by two different methods.

Werner Heisenberg then solved the same problem by treating the anharmonic potential term as a perturbation to the harmonic oscillator and using the perturbation methods that he and Born had developed.

Werner Heisenberg justified this replacement by an appeal to Bohr's correspondence principle and the Pauli doctrine that quantum mechanics must be limited to observables.

In 1928, Albert Einstein nominated Werner Heisenberg, Born, and Jordan for the Nobel Prize in Physics, The announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1932 was delayed until November 1933.

In contrast to Albert Einstein and Louis de Broglie, who were realists who believed that particles had an objectively true momentum and position at all times, Werner Heisenberg was an anti-realist, arguing that direct knowledge of what is "real" was beyond the scope of science.

Shortly after the discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick in 1932, Werner Heisenberg submitted the first of three papers on his neutron-proton model of the nucleus.

Werner Heisenberg fought back with an editorial and a letter to Himmler, in an attempt to resolve the matter and regain his honour.

Werner Heisenberg's appointment was considered a travesty and detrimental to educating theoretical physicists.

Indeed, Werner Heisenberg had participated in the doctoral examination of one of them at the Universitat Leipzig.

In mid-1936, Werner Heisenberg presented his theory of cosmic-ray showers in two papers.

In June 1939, Werner Heisenberg traveled to the United States in June and July, visiting Samuel Abraham Goudsmit at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

However, Werner Heisenberg refused an invitation to emigrate to the United States.

Werner Heisenberg did not see Goudsmit again until six years later, when Goudsmit was the chief scientific advisor to the American Operation Alsos at the close of World War II.

The lecture, entitled "Die theoretischen Grundlagen fur die Energiegewinnung aus der Uranspaltung" was, as Werner Heisenberg confessed after the Second World War in a letter to Samuel Goudsmit, "adapted to the intellectual level of a Reichs Minister".

Werner Heisenberg lectured on the enormous energy potential of nuclear fission, stating that 250 million electron volts could be released through the fission of an atomic nucleus.

Werner Heisenberg stressed that pure U-235 had to be obtained to achieve a chain reaction.

Werner Heisenberg explored various ways of obtaining isotope U in its pure form, including uranium enrichment and an alternative layered method of normal uranium and a moderator in a machine.

Werner Heisenberg stressed the importance of the Army Weapons Office's financial and material support for this scientific endeavour.

Werner Heisenberg still had his department of physics at the University of Leipzig where work had been done for the Uranverein by Robert Dopel and his wife Klara Dopel.

On 4 June 1942, Werner Heisenberg was summoned to report to Albert Speer, Germany's Minister of Armaments, on the prospects for converting the Uranverein's research toward developing nuclear weapons.

In September 1942, Werner Heisenberg submitted his first paper of a three-part series on the scattering matrix, or S-matrix, in elementary particle physics.

In February 1943, Werner Heisenberg was appointed to the Chair for Theoretical Physics at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat.

From 24 January to 4 February 1944, Werner Heisenberg travelled to occupied Copenhagen, after the German army confiscated Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics.

Werner Heisenberg was smuggled out from Urfeld, on 3 May 1945, in an alpine operation in territory still under control by elite German forces.

Werner Heisenberg was taken to Heidelberg, where, on 5 May, he met Goudsmit for the first time since the Ann Arbor visit in 1939.

Ten German scientists, including Werner Heisenberg, were held at Farm Hall in England.

Werner Heisenberg told other scientists that he had never contemplated a bomb, only an atomic pile to produce energy.

Only a few of the scientists expressed genuine horror at the prospect of nuclear weapons, and Werner Heisenberg himself was cautious in discussing the matter.

Werner Heisenberg settled in Gottingen, which was in the British zone of Allied-occupied Germany.

Max von Laue was appointed vice director, while Karl Wirtz, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker and Ludwig Biermann joined to help Werner Heisenberg establish the institute.

Werner Heisenberg envisaged for this council to promote the dialogue between the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany and the scientific community based in Germany.

Werner Heisenberg became an ordentlicher Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen.

Werner Heisenberg was the sole director of MPIFA from 1960 to 1970.

Werner Heisenberg resigned his directorship of the MPIFA on 31 December 1970.

In 1951, Werner Heisenberg agreed to become the scientific representative of the Federal Republic of Germany at the UNESCO conference, with the aim of establishing a European laboratory for nuclear physics.

Werner Heisenberg's aim was to build a large particle accelerator, drawing on the resources and technical skills of scientists across the Western Bloc.

On 1 July 1953 Werner Heisenberg signed the convention that established CERN on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany.

In December 1953, Werner Heisenberg became the president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

In 1946, the German scientist Heinz Pose, head of Laboratory V in Obninsk, wrote a letter to Werner Heisenberg inviting him to work in the USSR.

In 1947, Werner Heisenberg presented lectures in Cambridge, Edinburgh and Bristol.

Werner Heisenberg contributed to the understanding of the phenomenon of superconductivity with a paper in 1947 and two papers in 1948, one of them with Max von Laue.

Werner Heisenberg published three papers in 1949, two in 1952, and one in 1955.

In late 1955 to early 1956, Werner Heisenberg gave the Gifford Lectures at St Andrews University, in Scotland, on the intellectual history of physics.

In 1957, Werner Heisenberg was a signatory of the Gottinger Manifest, taking a public stand against the Federal Republic of Germany arming itself with nuclear weapons.

From 1957 onwards, Werner Heisenberg was interested in plasma physics and the process of nuclear fusion.

Werner Heisenberg collaborated with the International Institute of Atomic Physics in Geneva.

Werner Heisenberg was a member of the Institute's scientific policy committee, and for several years was the Committee's chair.

In 1973, Werner Heisenberg gave a lecture at Harvard University on the historical development of the concepts of quantum theory.

On 24 March 1973 Werner Heisenberg gave a speech before the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, accepting the Romano Guardini Prize.

Werner Heisenberg admired Eastern philosophy and saw parallels between it and quantum mechanics, describing himself as in "complete agreement" with the book The Tao of Physics.

Werner Heisenberg even went as far to state that after conversations with Rabindranath Tagore about Indian philosophy "some of the ideas that seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense".

In lectures given in the 1950s and later published as Physics and Philosophy, Werner Heisenberg contended that scientific advances were leading to cultural conflicts.

Werner Heisenberg stated that modern physics is "part of a general historical process that tends toward a unification and a widening of our present world".

When Werner Heisenberg accepted the Romano Guardini Prize in 1974, he gave a speech, which he later published under the title Scientific and Religious Truth.

Werner Heisenberg had initiated the project in 1966, when his public lectures increasingly turned to the subjects of philosophy and religion.

Werner Heisenberg wrote his memoirs as a chain of conversations, covering the course of his life.

Werner Heisenberg worked on his autobiography and published it with the Piper Verlag in Munich.

Werner Heisenberg initially proposed the title Gesprache im Umkreis der Atomphysik.

Werner Heisenberg died of kidney cancer at his home, on 1 February 1976.

In 1980 his widow, Elisabeth Werner Heisenberg, published The Political Life of an Apolitical Person.

Werner Heisenberg's surname is used as the primary alias for Walter White, the lead character in AMC's crime drama series Breaking Bad, throughout White's transformation from a high-school chemistry teacher into a meth cook and a drug kingpin.

Werner Heisenberg was the target of an assassination by spy Moe Berg in the film The Catcher Was a Spy, based on real events.

Werner Heisenberg is the namesake of Resident Evil Village secondary antagonist Karl Werner Heisenberg.