Werner Heisenberg facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Werner Heisenberg
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Heisenberg in 1933
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| Born |
Werner Karl Heisenberg
5 December 1901 Würzburg, Kingdom of Bavaria, German Empire
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| Died | 1 February 1976 (aged 74) |
| Resting place | Munich Waldfriedhof |
| Alma mater | |
| Known for |
Copenhagen interpretation
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle Heisenberg commutation relation 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 Heisenberg–Langevin equations Euler–Heisenberg Lagrangian Kramers–Heisenberg formula Isospin Matrix mechanics C*-algebra Exchange force Exchange interaction Electron hole theory Mott problem Generalized optical theorem Quantum field theory Quantum fluctuation Quantum spacetime Resonance (chemistry) S-matrix S-matrix theory Spin isomers of hydrogen Proton–neutron model of the nucleus Vacuum polarization Wave function collapse Uranprojekt |
| Spouse(s) |
Elisabeth Schumacher
(m. 1937) |
| Children | 7 (incl. Jochen and Martin) |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Theoretical physics |
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| Thesis | Über Stabilität und Turbulenz von Flüssigkeitsströmen (On stability and turbulence of liquid flows) (1923) |
| Doctoral advisor | Arnold Sommerfeld |
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| Signature | |
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Werner Karl Heisenberg (born December 5, 1901 – died February 1, 1976) was a German physicist who studied theories about how the universe works. He was one of the main people who helped create the theory of quantum mechanics. This theory helps us understand how tiny particles behave.
In 1925, Heisenberg published a very important paper. Later that year, working with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, he developed a mathematical way to describe quantum mechanics using something called matrix mechanics. He is also famous for his uncertainty principle, which he shared in 1927. This principle says that you can't know both the exact position and the exact speed of a particle at the same time. Heisenberg won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for creating quantum mechanics.
Heisenberg also studied other areas of physics. He looked at how liquids move in a swirly way (turbulent flow). He also researched the center of atoms (the atomic nucleus), how magnets work (ferromagnetism), and tiny particles from space called cosmic rays. During World War II, he was a key scientist in Germany's nuclear energy program. After the war, he helped plan Germany's first nuclear reactors.
After World War II, Heisenberg became the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. This institute was later renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He led this institute until 1958. From 1960 to 1970, he directed the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. He also held important roles in German science organizations.
Contents
Early Life and Education
Growing Up and Learning
Werner Karl Heisenberg was born in Würzburg, Germany. His father, Kaspar Ernst August Heisenberg, was a teacher of old languages. He later became a professor of medieval and modern Greek studies.
Heisenberg grew up in the Lutheran Christian faith. As a teenager, he read Plato's Timaeus while hiking. He often talked with his friends and teachers about understanding the atom. He later said that studying philosophy, like Plato, helped shape his mind. He believed that modern physics showed that the smallest parts of matter are like "forms" or "ideas" that can only be described with math.
In 1919, Heisenberg joined a group called the Freikorps in Munich. He helped fight against a short-lived government called the Bavarian Soviet Republic. He later said it was like "playing cops and robbers," and his tasks were simple, like taking bicycles from government buildings.
University Studies
From 1920 to 1923, Heisenberg studied physics and math. He attended the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the University of Göttingen. His teachers included famous scientists like Arnold Sommerfeld, Wilhelm Wien, Max Born, and James Franck. He earned his doctorate degree in 1923 from Munich.
In 1924, he finished his advanced studies at Göttingen. His work focused on a topic called the anomalous Zeeman effect.
In 1922, Heisenberg met Niels Bohr for the first time. Bohr was a very important physicist. This meeting had a big impact on Heisenberg.
Heisenberg's doctoral paper was about how liquids flow, especially in a swirly way, known as turbulence. He looked at how stable smooth flow is and what makes it become turbulent. He returned to this topic after World War II.
As a young man, he was a leader in a German Scout group. In 1923, he helped organize a trip to Finland with his Scout group.
Personal Life
Heisenberg loved classical music and was a talented pianist. His love for music led him to meet his future wife, Elisabeth Schumacher. They met at a music event in January 1937 and married on April 29.
They had seven children. Their first two, twins Maria and Wolfgang, were born in 1938. Another physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, joked that it was a "pair creation," a physics term. They bought a summer home in Urfeld am Walchensee in southern Germany for their family.
Academic Career
Working in Göttingen, Copenhagen, and Leipzig
From 1924 to 1927, Heisenberg taught at Göttingen. He was able to teach and examine students on his own. From 1924 to 1925, he did research with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen.
In September 1925, he published his key paper on quantum mechanics. He then returned to Göttingen. With Max Born and Pascual Jordan, he developed the matrix mechanics way of describing quantum mechanics.
In 1926, Heisenberg became a lecturer and assistant to Bohr in Copenhagen. It was there, in 1927, that he developed his famous uncertainty principle. He first described this idea in a letter to his friend and fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli. In his paper, he used the word "imprecision" to describe it.
In 1927, Heisenberg became a full professor of theoretical physics at the University of Leipzig. He gave his first lecture there in 1928. In his first paper from Leipzig, he used a rule called the Pauli exclusion principle to explain ferromagnetism, which is how some materials become magnets.
Many talented students and researchers worked with Heisenberg in Leipzig. These included Felix Bloch, Edward Teller, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker.
In 1929, Heisenberg and Pauli started to lay the groundwork for a new theory called quantum field theory. Also in 1929, Heisenberg traveled to China, Japan, India, and the United States to give lectures. He was a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago.
In 1928, Paul Dirac had developed an equation that suggested the existence of positive electrons, later called positrons. In 1932, a physicist named Carl David Anderson found evidence of a positron. In 1933, Heisenberg presented his theory about the positron. He showed that Dirac's equation could describe electrons and that particles could be created and destroyed.
Matrix Mechanics and the Nobel Prize
Heisenberg's paper that started quantum mechanics was very new. It used a new idea: non-commuting matrices. This means that when you multiply these mathematical objects, the order matters. Heisenberg used physical reasoning to explain this, even though he wasn't very familiar with matrix math at the time.
In Copenhagen, Heisenberg worked with Hans Kramers on how light scatters off atoms. They showed that a successful formula Kramers had developed couldn't be based on old ideas about electron orbits. Instead, it could be explained by a model where light excites electrons to a "virtual state" before they return to normal.
These successes, and the failure of older models to explain certain effects, led Heisenberg to use this "virtual oscillator" model to calculate frequencies of light. He then found a way to describe these results without relying on the virtual oscillator model. He replaced the old mathematical descriptions with matrices. He believed this was the right way because it focused only on things that could be observed.
On July 9, Heisenberg gave his paper to Max Born to review. Born immediately saw that Heisenberg's ideas could be written using the systematic language of matrices. Born, with his assistant Pascual Jordan, quickly developed this idea further. They published their results shortly after Heisenberg's paper. All three authors then published a joint paper.
Before this, physicists rarely used matrices. They were mostly seen as a part of pure math. But in quantum mechanics, the way matrices multiplied became very important.
In 1928, Albert Einstein nominated Heisenberg, Born, and Jordan for the Nobel Prize in Physics. The prize for 1932 was announced in November 1933. Heisenberg won it "for the creation of quantum mechanics."
German Nuclear Weapons Program
Pre-War Physics Work
In 1936, Heisenberg presented his ideas on cosmic-ray showers. These are bursts of particles from space. He published several papers on this topic over the next two years.
In December 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered nuclear fission. This is when an atom's nucleus splits apart. They found that bombarding uranium with neutrons produced barium. Hahn shared this with Lise Meitner, who had fled Germany. Meitner and her nephew, Otto Robert Frisch, correctly understood this as nuclear fission.
In June 1939, Heisenberg visited the United States. He was invited to move there, but he chose to return to Germany.
Joining the Uranverein
Germany's nuclear energy program, called Uranverein (Uranium Club), started on September 1, 1939, the day World War II began. The Army Ordnance Office took charge of the project. Heisenberg joined a meeting about the project soon after it started. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics was put under military control for this research.
In February 1942, Heisenberg gave a lecture to German officials about getting energy from nuclear fission. He explained the huge energy that could be released from splitting an atom. He said that pure uranium-235 was needed to create a chain reaction. He talked about different ways to get this pure uranium and how a "uranium machine" (a nuclear reactor) could power vehicles. Heisenberg stressed that the project needed strong financial support.
In April 1942, Heisenberg was named director of the Physics Institute. The previous director, Peter Debye, had left Germany. Heisenberg also continued his work at the University of Leipzig.
On June 4, 1942, Heisenberg met with Albert Speer, Germany's Minister of Armaments. Heisenberg told Speer that building an atomic bomb would take a lot of money and people, and it couldn't be done before 1945.
After this, the Uranverein focused on producing nuclear power, not bombs. The project was divided among different institutes. By 1942, about 70 scientists were working on the program. After 1942, fewer scientists worked on nuclear fission, as many focused on other war-related tasks.
In 1943, Heisenberg published papers on the scattering matrix (S-matrix) in particle physics. This method described particles before and after a collision, without focusing on what happened in between.
In February 1943, Heisenberg became a professor at the University of Berlin. He also became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. As Allied bombing increased, he moved his family to their summer home in Urfeld. He also started moving his staff from Berlin to Hechingen and Haigerloch in the Black Forest.
In December 1944, Heisenberg gave a lecture in neutral Switzerland. An American agent named Moe Berg attended the lecture. He had orders to shoot Heisenberg if it seemed Germany was close to building an atomic bomb.
In January 1945, Heisenberg and his staff moved completely to the Black Forest facilities.
After World War II
1945: The Alsos Mission
The Alsos Mission was an Allied effort to find out if Germany had an atomic bomb program. They also wanted to capture German scientists and research materials. Many German research facilities had been moved to avoid bombing. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics was moved to Hechingen and Haigerloch. This allowed the American Alsos Mission to capture many German nuclear scientists.
Heisenberg was taken from Urfeld on May 3, 1945. He met Samuel Goudsmit, the chief scientific advisor to the Alsos Mission, in Heidelberg. Germany surrendered two days later. Heisenberg was then taken to England.
1945: Learning About Hiroshima
Nine important German scientists, including Heisenberg, were captured and held in England. They were kept at a place called Farm Hall. Their conversations were secretly recorded.
On August 6, 1945, the scientists at Farm Hall learned from the news that the USA had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. At first, they couldn't believe it. In the following weeks, they discussed how the USA might have built the bomb.
The recordings from Farm Hall show that Heisenberg and the other physicists were glad the Allies won the war. Heisenberg told others that he had only thought about building an atomic pile to produce energy, not a bomb. They also discussed the ethics of creating a bomb for the Nazis. Heisenberg said, "We wouldn't have had the moral courage to recommend to the government in the spring of 1942 that they should employ 120,000 men just for building the thing up."
Post-War Research Career
Leadership Roles in German Science
In January 1946, Heisenberg returned to Germany and settled in Göttingen. He immediately started working to promote scientific research in Germany. He became the director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He worked with other scientists to rebuild the institute.
Heisenberg also helped create the Forschungsrat (research council). He wanted this council to help scientists and the new German government work together. He became its president. In 1951, this group merged with another and was renamed the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation).
In 1958, the Max Planck Institute for Physics moved to Munich and was renamed the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik und Astrophysik (MPIFA). Heisenberg was a co-director and then the sole director from 1960 to 1970. He retired from this role in 1970.
Promoting International Science
In 1951, Heisenberg became Germany's science representative at a UNESCO conference. The goal was to create a European lab for nuclear physics. Heisenberg wanted to build a large particle accelerator using scientists from many Western countries. On July 1, 1953, he signed the agreement that created CERN. He was asked to be CERN's first scientific director but declined. Instead, he led CERN's science policy committee and helped shape its research.
In 1953, Heisenberg became president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. During his time, 550 scholars from 78 countries received research grants. He resigned shortly before his death.
Research Interests
In 1946, a Soviet scientist invited Heisenberg to work in the USSR, but Heisenberg politely declined. In 1947, Heisenberg gave lectures in England. He also contributed to understanding superconductivity, which is when materials can conduct electricity with no resistance.
After the war, Heisenberg briefly returned to studying turbulence, the topic of his doctoral paper. He also continued his work on cosmic-ray showers.
From 1955 to 1956, Heisenberg gave lectures in Scotland about the history of physics. These lectures were later published as Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science.
In 1957, Heisenberg signed the Göttinger Manifest. This was a public statement against West Germany getting nuclear weapons. He believed this would influence public opinion. He also worked on plasma physics and nuclear fusion.
In 1973, Heisenberg gave a lecture at Harvard University about the history of quantum theory. He also gave a speech called Scientific and Religious Truth.
Philosophy and Worldview
Heisenberg admired Eastern philosophy and saw connections between it and quantum mechanics. He felt that some ideas from Indian philosophy made more sense after talking with Rabindranath Tagore.
Heisenberg was a Christian. In his last letter to Albert Einstein, he wrote that God would know the position of subatomic particles, so the idea of cause and effect would still be true. Einstein, however, believed that quantum physics was incomplete because it suggested the universe was not entirely predictable.
In his book Physics and Philosophy, Heisenberg argued that scientific progress could lead to cultural conflicts. He believed that modern physics was part of a larger process that was bringing the world closer together.
Autobiography and Death
Heisenberg's son, Martin Heisenberg, became a neurobiologist, and his son Jochen Heisenberg became a physics professor.
In his late sixties, Heisenberg wrote his autobiography. It was published in Germany in 1969 and in English in 1971. He structured his book around themes like the goal of science, the challenges of language in atomic physics, and science and religion. He wrote it as a series of conversations. The book was popular but some historians found it simplified historical events.
Heisenberg died of kidney cancer at his home on February 1, 1976. The next evening, his colleagues and friends placed candles outside his home to remember him. He is buried in Munich Waldfriedhof.
In 1980, his wife, Elisabeth Heisenberg, wrote a book about him. She described him as a spontaneous person, a brilliant scientist, a talented artist, and only fourthly, a political person out of duty.
Honors and Awards
Heisenberg received many honors:
- Honorary degrees from several universities.
- Bavarian Order of Merit
- Romano Guardini Prize
- Grand Cross for Federal Service with Star
- Knight of the Order of Merit (Civil Class)
- Elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1955.
- Member of many science academies around the world.
- 1932 – Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics."
- 1933 – Max-Planck-Medaille
Images for kids
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Werner Heisenberg's signature
