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Founding of Quantum Physics
Heisenberg tackled the problem of spectrum intensities of the electron taken as a one-dimensional vibrating system. By November, with help from his new assistant Pascual Jordan, he published "On Quantum Mechanics II", colloquially known as the "three-man paper," which is regarded as the foundational document of a new quantum physics. -
Uncertainty Principle
Heisenberg asserted that quantum mechanics demonstrated that the momentum and position of a particle could not both be exactly measured simultaneously, but instead a relation exists between the indeterminacies in the measurement of these variables. He drew the profound conclusion that absolute causal determinism was impossible, since it required exact knowledge of both position and momentum as initial conditions, thus leading leading physicists to renounce deterministic causality. -
Nobel Prize
Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize for Physics for his contributions in the preceding years towards quantum field theory, uniting quantum mechanics with relativity theory to comprehend the interaction of particles and (force) fields. -
World War II
Heisenberg took a leading role in Germany's nuclear research. However, due to the German project being bureaucratically fractured and cut off from international collaboration, to say nothing of the Allied bombing of transportation networks, key materials were in short supply in Germany, making the research slow-going and eventually scrapped when it was determined that a nuclear bomb could not be constructed before the war was over. He was eventually captured and taken to England.
