Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)
One of the founders of quantum mechanics. He was born in Germany and studied under Sommerfeld at Munich; Wolfgang Pauli was one of his colleagues.
But the real mentor for him may have been Niels Bohr, whom Heisenberg first met in Goettingen in 1922. He studied with Bohr in 1924 and became a colleague in 1926 at Copenhagen. Heisenberg's great contributions to quantum mechanics were made in this period; first by constructing matrix mechanics, together with Max Born and others, and then by discovering the famous Indeterminacy Principle (sometimes called also Uncertainty Principle) in 1927. This says that it is impossible to determine the position and momentum of a particle beyond a certain limits which are essentially related with the Planck constant h. In other words, if you want a precise value for the position, you have to sacrifice precise information of momentum, and vice versa.
The political situation in Germany after 1935 affected Heisenberg and his friends. He had some difficulty with the Nazis regime; and during the Second World War, his relationship with Bohr was also marred. Heisenberg directed, together with Otto Hahn, the German project of the atomic bomb, but that was unsuccessful; and he was captured by the allied forces towards the end of the war.
After he returned to Germany after the war, he was appointed the Director of Max Planck Institute. And he wrote and lectured extensively on physics and philosophy. I personally listened to his lecture at Kyoto University in the mid-60s, and he suggested a philosophy of physics with the Platonist flavor, as I remember.
BACK TO HEISENBERG PICTURE//TO HEISENBERG PAGE IN NOBEL FOUNDATION
