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The Beginning of Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg was born on 5 December 1901, in Würzburg, Germany. Werner was raised since his birth seemingly around the scientific community immediately. He was son to Dr. August Heisenberg and his wife Annie Wecklein. Werner attended school and Maximillian school in Munich until 1920, where he then transitioned to the University of Munich to study physics (1). In 1923 he began his PhD at the University of Munich (1). -
1925 Paper
Werner H. created and published his paper dubbed "quantum-mechanical re-interpretation of kinetic and mechanical relations". This paper led to the creation of complete mathematical formulas in the field of Quantum Mechanics (P1, 2). Heisenberg labeled in his paper a few fields within the mathematics of quantum mechanics such as quantum kinematics and quantum dynamics (P3-6, 2). -
Matrix Mechanics
Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and Pascual Jordan together created the Matrix Mechanics. It's stated that "the matric formulation was built on the premise that all physical observables must be represented by matrices" (P48-49, 3). To be specific and simplistic about their achievement, what they did was "formulate a way to calculate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices" (4) which earned them a Nobel Prize later in 1932. -
Uncertainty Principle
Werner Heisenberg created the uncertainty principle which states "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" (5). This concept is almost required in the field of quantum mechanics, more specifically anything that functions in a wave like manner (5). Did you know that if a sub-atomic particle is observed it becomes a wave? How odd. -
Uncertainty Principle Video
Due to character limit, here's a short video explaining and giving examples of Heisenberg's "Uncertainty Principle." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQKELOE9eY4&t=1s -
Refusal to the Nazi Party
After the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939, Heisenberg was a key member of the "Uranium Club," which was a German led research and development nuclear energy project (6). Years later, in 1942, Heisenberg was approached by the Nazi party in an attempt to be persuaded to shift their focus on development of Nuclear Weapons to use in the war. He denied their request. After this, leadership of the project changed (6). He resisted the Nazi Party.