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Werner Karl Heisenberg ( pronounced [ˈvɛʁnɐ kaʁl ˈhaɪzn̩bɛʁk] ⓘ; 5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) [2] was a German theoretical physicist, one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics, and a principal scientist in the Nazi nuclear weapons program during World War II.
- Overview
- Education
- Founding of quantum mechanics
- Uncertainty principle
- Nobel Prize
Werner Heisenberg led the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, where research into nuclear reactors and atomic bombs was conducted. Germany built neither. Whether Heisenberg deliberately slowed German atomic progress is debated. However, Germany likely never developed an atomic bomb because its atomic research was on a smaller scale than the U.S. Manhattan Project.
What is Werner Heisenberg best known for?
Werner Heisenberg discovered the uncertainty principle, which states that the position and the momentum of an object cannot both be known exactly. The combined uncertainty for position and momentum is equal to or greater than h/(4π), where h is Planck’s constant, and thus is significant only for very small objects like atoms or subatomic particles.
How did Werner Heisenberg contribute to atomic theory?
Werner Heisenberg contributed to atomic theory through formulating quantum mechanics in terms of matrices and in discovering the uncertainty principle, which states that a particle’s position and momentum cannot both be known exactly. The combined uncertainty in both measurements must be equal to or greater than h/(4π), where h is Planck’s constant.
Werner Heisenberg (born December 5, 1901, Würzburg, Germany—died February 1, 1976, Munich, West Germany) German physicist and philosopher who discovered (1925) a way to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices. For that discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1932. In 1927 he published his uncertainty principle, upon which he built his philosophy and for which he is best known. He also made important contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles, and he was instrumental in planning the first West German nuclear reactor at Karlsruhe, together with a research reactor in Munich, in 1957. Considerable controversy surrounds his work on atomic research during World War II.
Heisenberg’s father, August Heisenberg, a scholar of ancient Greek philology and modern Greek literature, was a teacher at a gymnasium (classical-humanistic secondary school) and lecturer at the University of Würzburg. Werner’s mother, née Anna Wecklein, was the daughter of the rector of the elite Maximilians-Gymnasium in Munich. In 1910 August Heisenberg became a professor of Greek philology at the University of Munich. Werner entered the Maximilians-Gymnasium the following year and soon impressed his teachers with his precocity in mathematics. Heisenberg entered the University of Munich in 1920, becoming a student of Arnold Sommerfeld, an expert on atomic spectroscopy and exponent of the quantum model of physics. (The idea that certain properties in atomic physics are not continuous and take on only certain discrete, or quantized, values at small scales had been developed by Danish physicist Niels Bohr in 1913.) Heisenberg finished his formal work for a doctorate in 1923 with a dissertation on hydrodynamics.
Despite a mediocre dissertation defense, Heisenberg’s real talents emerged in his work on the anomalous Zeeman effect, in which atomic spectral lines are split into multiple components under the influence of a magnetic field. Heisenberg developed a model that accounted for this phenomenon, though at the cost of introducing half-integer quantum numbers, a notion at odds with Bohr’s theory as understood to date. While still officially Sommerfeld’s student, in 1922 Heisenberg became an assistant and student of Max Born at the University of Göttingen, where Heisenberg also first met Bohr. In 1924 Heisenberg completed his habilitation, the qualification to teach at the university level in Germany.
In 1925, after an extended visit to Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, Heisenberg tackled the problem of spectrum intensities of the electron taken as an anharmonic oscillator (a one-dimensional vibrating system). His position that the theory should be based only on observable quantities was central to his paper of July 1925, “Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen” (“Quantum-Theoretical Reinterpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations”). Heisenberg’s formalism rested upon noncommutative multiplication; Born, together with his new assistant Pascual Jordan, realized that this could be expressed using matrix algebra, which they used in a paper submitted for publication in September as “Zur Quantenmechanik” (“On Quantum Mechanics”). By November, Born, Heisenberg, and Jordan had completed “Zur Quantenmechanik II” (“On Quantum Mechanics II”), colloquially known as the “three-man paper,” which is regarded as the foundational document of a new quantum mechanics.
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Other formulations of quantum mechanics were being devised during the 1920s: the bracket notation (using vectors in a Hilbert space) was developed by P.A.M. Dirac in England and the wave equation was worked out by Erwin Schrödinger in Switzerland (where the Austrian physicist was then working). Schrödinger soon demonstrated that the different formulations were mathematically equivalent, though the physical significance of this equivalence remained unclear. Heisenberg again returned to Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, and their conversations on this topic culminated in Heisenberg’s landmark paper of March 1927, “Über den anschulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik” (“On the Perceptual Content of Quantum Theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics”).
This paper articulated the uncertainty, or indeterminacy, principle. Quantum mechanics demonstrated, according to Heisenberg, that the momentum (p) and position (x) of a particle could not both be exactly measured simultaneously. Instead, a relation exists between the indeterminacies (Δ) in the measurement of these variables such that ΔpΔx ≥ h/4π (where h is Planck’s constant, or 6.62606957 × 10−34 joule∙second). Since there exists a lower limit (h/4π) on the product of the uncertainties, if the uncertainty in one variable diminishes toward 0, the uncertainty in the other must increase reciprocally. An analogous relation exists between any pair of canonically conjugate variables, such as energy and time.
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In 1927 Heisenberg took up a professorship in Leipzig. In exchange with Dirac, Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, and others, he embarked on a research program to create a quantum field theory, uniting quantum mechanics with relativity theory to comprehend the interaction of particles and (force) fields. Heisenberg also worked on the theory of the atomic nucl...
Key facts. Full name: Werner Karl Heisenberg. Born : 5 December 1901, Würzburg, Germany. Died : 1 February 1976, Munich, Germany. Werner Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist famous for ...
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Werner Karl Heisenberg (December 5, 1901 – February 1, 1976) was a celebrated German physicist and Nobel laureate, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, and acknowledged to be one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century. He was born in Würzburg, Germany and died in Munich. Heisenberg was the head of German nuclear ...
Formulated by the German physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg in 1927, the uncertainty principle states that we cannot know both the position and speed of a particle, such as a photon or electron, with perfect accuracy; the more we nail down the particle's position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa.
Werner Heisenberg's father was August Heisenberg and his mother was Anna Wecklein. At the time that Werner was born his father was about to progress from being a school teacher of classical languages to being appointed as a Privatdozent at the University of Würzburg.
May 29, 2018 · Werner Heisenberg. Born: December 5, 1901 W ü rzburg, Germany Died: February 1, 1976 Munich, Germany German physicist. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was a leader in physics, winning the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the uncertainty principle, which states that it is impossible to specify the exact position and momentum of a particle (tiny piece of matter) at the same time.
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