Werner Karl Heisenberg

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Werner Heisenberg attended school in Munich and the entered the University of Munich. There he, and his fellow student Pauli, studied physics under Sommerfeld. After completing his undergraduate course he continued study for his doctorate presenting his doctoral dissertation in 1923 on turbulence in fluid streams.

Heisenberg, as Pauli had done shortly before, went from Munich to the University of Göttingen where he studied there under Max Born. In 1924 he went to the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen where he studied under Niels Bohr. A lecture series by Niels Bohr convinced him to work on quantum theory.

Heisenberg later wrote:-

I learned optimism from Sommerfeld, mathematics at Göttingen, and physics from Bohr.

Heisenberg did important work in nuclear and particle physics, but his most important work was in quantum mechanics.

Heisenberg invented matrix mechanics, the first version of quantum mechanics, in 1925. He did not invent these concepts as a matrix algebra, however, rather he focused attention on a set of quantised probability amplitudes. These amplitudes formed a non-commutative algebra. It was Max Born and Pascual Jordan in Göttingen who recognised this non-commutative algebra to be a matrix algebra.

Matrix mechanics was further developed in a three author paper by Heisenberg, Born and Jordan published in 1926. Heisenberg published The Physical Principles of Quantum Theory in 1928. In 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for this work.

Heisenberg is best known for the Uncertainty Principle which he discovered in 1927. It was in 1927 that Heisenberg attended the Solvay Conference in Brussels. He wrote in 1969:-

To those of us who participated in the development of atomic theory, the five years following the Solvay Conference in Brussels in 1927 looked so wonderful that we often spoke of them as the golden age of atomic physics. The great obstacles that had occupied all our efforts in the preceding years had been cleared out of the way; the gate to an entirely new field, the quantum mechanics of the atomic shells stood wide open, and fresh fruits seemed ready for the picking.

In 1932 Heisenberg wrote a three part paper which describes the modern picture of the nucleus of an atom. He treated the structure of the various nuclear components discussing their binding energies and their stability. These papers opened the way for others to apply quantum theory to the atomic nucleus.

During the Second World War he headed the unsuccessful German nuclear weapons project. He worked with Otto Hahn, one of the discoverers of nuclear fission, on the development of a nuclear reactor but failed to develop an effective program for nuclear weapons. Whether this was because of lack of resources or a lack of a desire to put nuclear weapons in the hands of the Nazis, it is unclear.

After the war he was interned in Britain with other leading German scientists. However he returned to Germany in 1946 when he was appointed director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics at Göttingen. In 1958 the Institute moved to Munich and Heisenberg continued as its director.

He was also interested in the philosophy of physics and wrote Physics and Philosophy (1962) and Physics and Beyond (1971).

The URL of this page is:
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/history/Mathematicians/Heisenberg.html

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