Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 â 1 February 1976)
[ was a German ]theoretical physicist
Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experimen ...
and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, ...
. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series of papers with Max Born
Max Born (; 11 December 1882 â 5 January 1970) was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a n ...
and Pascual Jordan
Ernst Pascual Jordan (; 18 October 1902 â 31 July 1980) was a German theoretical and mathematical physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He contributed much to the mathematical form of matrix ...
, during the same year, his matrix formulation of quantum mechanics was substantially elaborated. He is known for the uncertainty principle
In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (also known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the accuracy with which the values for certain pairs of physic ...
, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics
)
, image = Nobel Prize.png
, alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFRâą" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NATâą" then " ...
"for the creation of quantum mechanics".
Heisenberg also made contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics
In physics and engineering, fluid dynamics is a subdiscipline of fluid mechanics that describes the flow of fluidsâliquids and gases. It has several subdisciplines, including ''aerodynamics'' (the study of air and other gases in motion) and ...
of turbulent flow
In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is fluid motion characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and flow velocity. It is in contrast to a laminar flow, which occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between ...
s, the atomic nucleus
The atomic nucleus is the small, dense region consisting of protons and neutrons at the center of an atom, discovered in 1911 by Ernest Rutherford based on the 1909 GeigerâMarsden gold foil experiment. After the discovery of the neutron i ...
, ferromagnetism
Ferromagnetism is a property of certain materials (such as iron) which results in a large observed magnetic permeability, and in many cases a large magnetic coercivity allowing the material to form a permanent magnet. Ferromagnetic materials ...
, cosmic rays
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own ...
, and subatomic particles
In physical sciences, a subatomic particle is a particle that composes an atom. According to the Standard Model of particle physics, a subatomic particle can be either a composite particle, which is composed of other particles (for example, a prot ...
. He was a principal scientist in the German nuclear weapons program
The Uranverein ( en, "Uranium Club") or Uranprojekt ( en, "Uranium Project") was the name given to the project in Germany to research nuclear technology, including nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, during World War II. It went through seve ...
during World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countriesâincluding all of the great powersâforming two opposin ...
. He was also instrumental in planning the first West German nuclear reactor
A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a fission nuclear chain reaction or nuclear fusion reactions. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in nuclear marine propulsion. Heat from nu ...
at Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe ( , , ; South Franconian: ''Kallsruh'') is the third-largest city of the German state (''Land'') of Baden-WĂŒrttemberg after its capital of Stuttgart and Mannheim, and the 22nd-largest city in the nation, with 308,436 inhabitants. ...
, together with a research reactor
Research reactors are nuclear fission-based nuclear reactors that serve primarily as a neutron source. They are also called non-power reactors, in contrast to power reactors that are used for electricity production, heat generation, or maritim ...
in Munich
Munich ( ; german: MĂŒnchen ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the States of Germany, German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the List of cities in Germany by popu ...
, in 1957.
Following World War II, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics
The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science (German language, German: ''Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften'') was a German scientific institution established in the German Empire in 1911. Its functions we ...
, which soon thereafter was renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics
The Max Planck Institute for Physics (MPP) is a physics institute in Munich, Germany that specializes in high energy physics and astroparticle physics. It is part of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and is also known as the Werner Heisenberg Institu ...
. He was director of the institute until it was moved to Munich in 1958. He then became director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics
The Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics is a former institute of the Max Planck Society in Germany. Located in Munich, it was also known as the Werner Heisenberg Institute. The institute was founded in 1958 as a successor to the Max ...
from 1960 to 1970.
Heisenberg was also president of the German Research Council, chairman of the Commission for Atomic Physics, chairman of the Nuclear Physics Working Group, and president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (german: Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung) is a foundation established by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and funded by the Federal Foreign Office, the Federal Ministry of Education and Resear ...
.[
]
Early life and education
Early years
Werner Karl Heisenberg was born in WĂŒrzburg
WĂŒrzburg (; Main-Franconian: ) is a city in the region of Franconia in the north of the German state of Bavaria. WĂŒrzburg is the administrative seat of the ''Regierungsbezirk'' Lower Franconia. It spans the banks of the Main River.
WĂŒrzburg is ...
, Germany, to Kaspar Ernst August Heisenberg
Kaspar Ernst August Heisenberg, shortened in and best known as August Heisenberg (November 13, 1869 in OsnabrĂŒck â November 22, 1930 in Munich), was a German Byzantinist. His son was Werner Heisenberg.
Heisenberg came from a Westphalian family ...
, and his wife, Annie Wecklein. His father was a secondary school teacher of classical language
A classical language is any language with an independent literary tradition and a large and ancient body of written literature. Classical languages are typically dead languages, or show a high degree of diglossia, as the spoken varieties of the ...
s who became Germany's only ''ordentlicher Professor
Academic ranks in Germany are the titles, relative importance and power of professors, researchers, and administrative personnel held in academia.
Overview
Appointment grades
* (Pay grade: ''W3'' or ''W2'')
* (''W3'')
* (''W2'')
* (''W2'', ...
'' (ordinarius professor) of medieval and modern Greek
Modern Greek (, , or , ''KinĂ NeoellinikĂ GlĂłssa''), generally referred to by speakers simply as Greek (, ), refers collectively to the dialects of the Greek language spoken in the modern era, including the official standardized form of the ...
studies in the university system.
Heisenberg was raised and lived as a Lutheran
Lutheranism is one of the largest branches of Protestantism, identifying primarily with the theology of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German monk and reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practice of the Catholic Church launched th ...
Christian. In his late teenage years, Heisenberg read Plato's ''Timaeus Timaeus (or Timaios) is a Greek name. It may refer to:
* ''Timaeus'' (dialogue), a Socratic dialogue by Plato
*Timaeus of Locri, 5th-century BC Pythagorean philosopher, appearing in Plato's dialogue
*Timaeus (historian) (c. 345 BC-c. 250 BC), Greek ...
'' while hiking in the Bavarian Alps. He recounted philosophical conversations with his fellow students and teachers about understanding the atom
Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The nucleus is made of one or more protons and a number of neutrons. Only the most common variety of hydrogen has no neutrons.
Every solid, liquid, gas, and ...
while receiving his scientific training in Munich, Göttingen and Copenhagen. Heisenberg later stated that "My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing". and that "Modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language".
In 1919 Heisenberg arrived in Munich as a member of the ''Freikorps
(, "Free Corps" or "Volunteer Corps") were irregular German and other European military volunteer units, or paramilitary, that existed from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. They effectively fought as mercenary or private armies, regar ...
'' to fight the Bavarian Soviet Republic
The Bavarian Soviet Republic, or Munich Soviet Republic (german: RĂ€terepublik Baiern, MĂŒnchner RĂ€terepublik),Hollander, Neil (2013) ''Elusive Dove: The Search for Peace During World War I''. McFarland. p.283, note 269. was a short-lived unre ...
established a year earlier. Five decades later he recalled those days as youthful fun, like "playing cops and robbers and so on; it was nothing serious at all;" his duties were restricted to "seizing bicycles or typewriters from 'red' administrative buildings", and guarding suspected "red" prisoners.
University studies
From 1920 to 1923, he studied physics and mathematics at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-UniversitĂ€t MĂŒnchen) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It is Germany's sixth-oldest university in continuous operatio ...
under Arnold Sommerfeld
Arnold Johannes Wilhelm Sommerfeld, (; 5 December 1868 â 26 April 1951) was a German theoretical physicist who pioneered developments in atomic and quantum physics, and also educated and mentored many students for the new era of theoretica ...
and Wilhelm Wien
Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien (; 13 January 1864 â 30 August 1928) was a German physicist who, in 1893, used theories about heat and electromagnetism to deduce Wien's displacement law, which calculates the emission of a blackbody ...
and at the Georg-August University of Göttingen with Max Born
Max Born (; 11 December 1882 â 5 January 1970) was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a n ...
and James Franck
James Franck (; 26 August 1882 â 21 May 1964) was a German physicist who won the 1925 Nobel Prize for Physics with Gustav Hertz "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom". He completed his doctorate in ...
and mathematics with David Hilbert
David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 â 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician, one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many a ...
. He received his doctorate in 1923 at Munich under Sommerfeld.
At Göttingen, under Born, he completed his habilitation
Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in many European countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excellence in research, teaching and further education, usually including a ...
in 1924 with a ''Habilitationsschrift'' (habilitation thesis) on the anomalous Zeeman effect
The Zeeman effect (; ) is the effect of splitting of a spectral line into several components in the presence of a static magnetic field. It is named after the Dutch physicist Pieter Zeeman, who discovered it in 1896 and received a Nobel prize ...
.
Werner Heisenberg Biography
'', ''Nobel Prize in Physics 1932'' Nobelprize.org.[; see the entry for Heisenberg.]
In June 1922, Sommerfeld took Heisenberg to Göttingen to attend the Bohr Festival
The Bohr Festival (german: Bohrfestspiele) was a series of seven lectures given by Niels Bohr 12 to 22 June 1922 at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Göttingen. These were the Wolfskehl Lectures, funded by the Wolfskehl Foundation. Taking p ...
, because Sommerfeld had a sincere interest in his students and knew of Heisenberg's interest in Niels Bohr
Niels Henrik David Bohr (; 7 October 1885 â 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. B ...
's theories on atomic physics
Atomic physics is the field of physics that studies atoms as an isolated system of electrons and an atomic nucleus. Atomic physics typically refers to the study of atomic structure and the interaction between atoms. It is primarily concerned wit ...
. At the event, Bohr was a guest lecturer and gave a series of comprehensive lectures on quantum atomic physics and Heisenberg met Bohr for the first time, which had a lasting effect on him.
Heisenberg's doctoral thesis
A thesis ( : theses), or dissertation (abbreviated diss.), is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings.International Standard ISO 7144: ...
, the topic of which was suggested by Sommerfeld, was on turbulence
In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is fluid motion characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and flow velocity. It is in contrast to a laminar flow, which occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between ...
; the thesis discussed both the stability of laminar flow
In fluid dynamics, laminar flow is characterized by fluid particles following smooth paths in layers, with each layer moving smoothly past the adjacent layers with little or no mixing. At low velocities, the fluid tends to flow without lateral mi ...
and the nature of turbulent flow
In fluid dynamics, turbulence or turbulent flow is fluid motion characterized by chaotic changes in pressure and flow velocity. It is in contrast to a laminar flow, which occurs when a fluid flows in parallel layers, with no disruption between ...
. The problem of stability was investigated by the use of the OrrâSommerfeld equation The OrrâSommerfeld equation, in fluid dynamics, is an eigenvalue equation describing the linear two-dimensional modes of disturbance to a viscous parallel flow. The solution to the NavierâStokes equations for a parallel, laminar flow can become ...
, a fourth order linear differential equation
In mathematics, a linear differential equation is a differential equation that is defined by a linear polynomial in the unknown function and its derivatives, that is an equation of the form
:a_0(x)y + a_1(x)y' + a_2(x)y'' \cdots + a_n(x)y^ = b( ...
for small disturbances from laminar flow. He briefly returned to this topic after World War II.
In his youth he was a member and Scoutleader of the ''Neupfadfinder'', a German Scout association and part of the German Youth Movement
The German Youth Movement (german: Die deutsche Jugendbewegung) is a collective term for a cultural and educational movement that started in 1896. It consists of numerous associations of young people that focus on outdoor activities. The movement ...
. In August 1923 Robert Honsell and Heisenberg organized a trip to Finland with a Scout group of this association from Munich.
Personal life
Heisenberg enjoyed classical music
Classical music generally refers to the art music of the Western world, considered to be distinct from Western folk music or popular music traditions. It is sometimes distinguished as Western classical music, as the term "classical music" also ...
and was an accomplished pianist.[ His interest in music led to meeting his future wife. In January 1937, Heisenberg met Elisabeth Schumacher (1914â1998) at a private music recital. Elisabeth was the daughter of a well-known Berlin economics professor, and her brother was the economist ]E. F. Schumacher
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher (16 August 1911 â 4 September 1977) was a German-British statistician and economist who is best known for his proposals for human-scale, decentralised and appropriate technologies.Biography on the inner dustjacket ...
, author of ''Small Is Beautiful
''Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered'' is a collection of essays published in 1973 by German-born British economist E. F. Schumacher. The title "Small Is Beautiful" came from a principle espoused by Schumach ...
''. Heisenberg married her on 29 April. Fraternal twins Maria and Wolfgang were born in January 1938, whereupon Wolfgang Pauli
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (; ; 25 April 1900 â 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics fo ...
congratulated Heisenberg on his "pair creation"âa word play on a process from elementary particle physics, pair production
Pair production is the creation of a subatomic particle and its antiparticle from a neutral boson. Examples include creating an electron and a positron, a muon and an antimuon, or a proton and an antiproton. Pair production often refers specific ...
. They had five more children over the next 12 years: Barbara, Christine, Jochen, Martin Martin may refer to:
Places
* Martin City (disambiguation)
* Martin County (disambiguation)
* Martin Township (disambiguation)
Antarctica
* Martin Peninsula, Marie Byrd Land
* Port Martin, Adelie Land
* Point Martin, South Orkney Islands
Austral ...
and Verena. In 1936 he bought a summer home for his family in Urfeld am Walchensee Urfeld am Walchensee is a village in the municipality of Kochel am See in the district of Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen in Bavaria, Germany. It lies on the northwest shore of Lake Walchensee.Gudelius, Jost: ''Die Jachenau''. Jachenau 2008, , S. 139
Fam ...
, in southern Germany.
Academic career
Göttingen, Copenhagen and Leipzig
From 1924 to 1927, Heisenberg was a Privatdozent
''Privatdozent'' (for men) or ''Privatdozentin'' (for women), abbreviated PD, P.D. or Priv.-Doz., is an academic title conferred at some European universities, especially in German-speaking countries, to someone who holds certain formal qualific ...
at Göttingen
Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...
, meaning he was qualified to teach and examine independently, without having a chair. From 17 September 1924 to 1 May 1925, under an International Education Board Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation is an American private foundation and philanthropic medical research and arts funding organization based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The second-oldest major philanthropic institution in America, after the Carneg ...
fellowship, Heisenberg went to do research with Niels Bohr
Niels Henrik David Bohr (; 7 October 1885 â 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. B ...
, director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen
The University of Copenhagen ( da, KĂžbenhavns Universitet, KU) is a prestigious public university, public research university in Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark. Founded in 1479, the University of Copenhagen is the second-oldest university in ...
. His seminal paper, "" ("Quantum theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations"), was published in September 1925. He returned to Göttingen and, with Max Born
Max Born (; 11 December 1882 â 5 January 1970) was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a n ...
and Pascual Jordan
Ernst Pascual Jordan (; 18 October 1902 â 31 July 1980) was a German theoretical and mathematical physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He contributed much to the mathematical form of matrix ...
over a period of about six months, developed the matrix mechanics
Matrix mechanics is a formulation of quantum mechanics created by Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan in 1925. It was the first conceptually autonomous and logically consistent formulation of quantum mechanics. Its account of quantum j ...
formulation of quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, ...
. On 1 May 1926, Heisenberg began his appointment as a university lecturer and assistant to Bohr in Copenhagen. It was in Copenhagen, in 1927, that Heisenberg developed his uncertainty principle
In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (also known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the accuracy with which the values for certain pairs of physic ...
, while working on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics. On 23 February, Heisenberg wrote a letter to fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (; ; 25 April 1900 â 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics fo ...
, in which he first described his new principle. In his paper on the principle, Heisenberg used the word "''Ungenauigkeit''" (imprecision), not uncertainty, to describe it.
In 1927, Heisenberg was appointed ''ordentlicher Professor'' (professor ordinarius) of theoretical physics and head of the department of physics at the University of Leipzig
Leipzig University (german: UniversitÀt Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 Decemb ...
; he gave his inaugural lecture there on 1 February 1928. In his first paper published from Leipzig, Heisenberg used the Pauli exclusion principle
In quantum mechanics, the Pauli exclusion principle states that two or more identical particles with half-integer spins (i.e. fermions) cannot occupy the same quantum state within a quantum system simultaneously. This principle was formulated ...
to solve the mystery of ferromagnetism
Ferromagnetism is a property of certain materials (such as iron) which results in a large observed magnetic permeability, and in many cases a large magnetic coercivity allowing the material to form a permanent magnet. Ferromagnetic materials ...
.[
During Heisenberg's tenure at Leipzig, the high quality of the doctoral students and ]post-graduate
Postgraduate or graduate education refers to academic or professional degrees, certificates, diplomas, or other qualifications pursued by post-secondary students who have earned an undergraduate ( bachelor's) degree.
The organization and stru ...
and research associates who studied and worked with him is clear from the acclaim many later earned. At various times they included Erich Bagge Erich Rudolf Bagge (30 May 1912, in Neustadt bei Coburg â 5 June 1996, in Kiel) was a German scientist. Bagge, a student of Werner Heisenberg for his doctorate and Habilitation, was engaged in German Atomic Energy research and the German nuclear e ...
, Felix Bloch
Felix Bloch (23 October 1905 â 10 September 1983) was a Swiss-American physicist and Nobel physics laureate who worked mainly in the U.S. He and Edward Mills Purcell were awarded the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for "their development of ne ...
, Ugo Fano
Ugo Fano (July 28, 1912 â February 13, 2001) was an Italian American physicist, notable for contributions to theoretical physics.
Biography
Ugo Fano was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Turin, Italy. His father was Gino Fano, a professo ...
, Siegfried FlĂŒgge
Siegfried FlĂŒgge (16 March 1912, in Dresden – 15 December 1997, in Hinterzarten) was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to nuclear physics and the theoretical basis for nuclear weapons. He worked on the German nuclear ene ...
, William Vermillion Houston
William Vermillion Houston (January 19, 1900 – August 22, 1968) was an American physicist who made contributions to spectroscopy, quantum mechanics, and solid-state physics as well as being a teacher and administrator. He became the secon ...
, Friedrich Hund
Friedrich Hermann Hund (4 February 1896 â 31 March 1997) was a German physicist from Karlsruhe known for his work on atoms and molecules.
Scientific career
Hund worked at the Universities of Rostock, Leipzig, Jena, Frankfurt am Main, and Göt ...
, Robert S. Mulliken
Robert Sanderson Mulliken Note Longuet-Higgins' amusing title for reference B238 1965 on page 354 of this Biographical Memoir. The title should be "Selected papers of Robert S Mulliken." (June 7, 1896 – October 31, 1986) was an American ph ...
, Rudolf Peierls
Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, (; ; 5 June 1907 â 19 September 1995) was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied ...
, George Placzek
George Placzek (; September 26, 1905 â October 9, 1955) was a Moravian physicist.
Biography
Placzek was born into a wealthy Jewish family in BrĂŒnn, Moravia (now Brno, Czech Republic), the grandson of Chief Rabbi Baruch Placzek.PDF He studied ...
, Isidor Isaac Rabi
Isidor Isaac Rabi (; born Israel Isaac Rabi, July 29, 1898 â January 11, 1988) was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which is used in magnetic resonance im ...
, Fritz Sauter
Fritz Eduard Josef Maria Sauter (; 9 June 1906 â 24 May 1983) was an Austrian-German physicist who worked mostly in quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics.
Education
From 1924 to 1928, Sauter studied mathematics and physics at the ...
, John C. Slater
John Clarke Slater (December 22, 1900 â July 25, 1976) was a noted American physicist who made major contributions to the theory of the electronic structure of atoms, molecules and solids. He also made major contributions to microwave electroni ...
, Edward Teller
Edward Teller ( hu, Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 â September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" (see the TellerâUlam design), although he did not care fo ...
, John Hasbrouck van Vleck
John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (March 13, 1899 â October 27, 1980) was an American physicist and mathematician. He was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977, for his contributions to the understanding of the behavior of electronic magnetism in ...
, Victor Frederick Weisskopf
Victor Frederick "Viki" Weisskopf (also spelled Viktor; September 19, 1908 â April 22, 2002) was an Austrian-born American theoretical physicist. He did postdoctoral work with Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, and Niels Boh ...
, Carl Friedrich von WeizsÀcker
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von WeizsĂ€cker (; 28 June 1912 â 28 April 2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under ...
, Gregor Wentzel
Gregor Wentzel (17 February 1898 â 12 August 1978) was a German physicist known for development of quantum mechanics. Wentzel, Hendrik Kramers, and LĂ©on Brillouin developed the WentzelâKramersâBrillouin approximation in 1926. In his early y ...
, and Clarence Zener
Clarence Melvin Zener (December 1, 1905 â July 2, 1993) was the American physicist who first (1934) described the property concerning the breakdown of electrical insulators. These findings were later exploited by Bell Labs in the development of ...
.
In early 1929, Heisenberg and Pauli submitted the first of two papers laying the foundation for relativistic quantum field theory
In theoretical physics, quantum field theory (QFT) is a theoretical framework that combines classical field theory, special relativity, and quantum mechanics. QFT is used in particle physics to construct physical models of subatomic particles and ...
. Also in 1929, Heisenberg went on a lecture tour of China, Japan, India, and the United States. In the spring of 1929, he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Chicago
The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...
, where he lectured on quantum mechanics.
In 1928, the British mathematical physicist
Mathematical physics refers to the development of mathematical methods for application to problems in physics. The ''Journal of Mathematical Physics'' defines the field as "the application of mathematics to problems in physics and the developmen ...
Paul Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (; 8 August 1902 â 20 October 1984) was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the Univer ...
had derived his relativistic wave equation
In physics, specifically relativistic quantum mechanics (RQM) and its applications to particle physics, relativistic wave equations predict the behavior of particles at high energies and velocities comparable to the speed of light. In the conte ...
of quantum mechanics, which implied the existence of positive electrons, later to be named positron
The positron or antielectron is the antiparticle or the antimatter counterpart of the electron. It has an electric charge of +1 '' e'', a spin of 1/2 (the same as the electron), and the same mass as an electron. When a positron collides ...
s. In 1932, from a cloud chamber
A cloud chamber, also known as a Wilson cloud chamber, is a particle detector used for visualizing the passage of ionizing radiation.
A cloud chamber consists of a sealed environment containing a supersaturated vapour of water or alcohol. ...
photograph of cosmic ray
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own ...
s, the American physicist Carl David Anderson
Carl David Anderson (September 3, 1905 â January 11, 1991) was an American physicist. He is best known for his discovery of the positron in 1932, an achievement for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics, and of the muon in 1936.
...
identified a track as having been made by a positron
The positron or antielectron is the antiparticle or the antimatter counterpart of the electron. It has an electric charge of +1 '' e'', a spin of 1/2 (the same as the electron), and the same mass as an electron. When a positron collides ...
. In mid-1933, Heisenberg presented his theory of the positron. His thinking on Dirac's theory and further development of the theory were set forth in two papers. The first, "Bemerkungen zur Diracschen Theorie des Positrons" ("Remarks on Dirac's theory of the positron") was published in 1934, and the second, "Folgerungen aus der Diracschen Theorie des Positrons" ("Consequences of Dirac's Theory of the Positron"), was published in 1936.[ In these papers Heisenberg was the first to reinterpret the ]Dirac equation
In particle physics, the Dirac equation is a relativistic wave equation derived by British physicist Paul Dirac in 1928. In its free form, or including electromagnetic interactions, it describes all spin- massive particles, called "Dirac part ...
as a "classical" field equation
In theoretical physics and applied mathematics, a field equation is a partial differential equation which determines the dynamics of a physical field, specifically the time evolution and spatial distribution of the field. The solutions to the equat ...
for any point particle of spin
Spin or spinning most often refers to:
* Spinning (textiles), the creation of yarn or thread by twisting fibers together, traditionally by hand spinning
* Spin, the rotation of an object around a central axis
* Spin (propaganda), an intentionally b ...
ħ/2, itself subject to quantization conditions involving anti-commutator
In mathematics, the commutator gives an indication of the extent to which a certain binary operation fails to be commutative. There are different definitions used in group theory and ring theory.
Group theory
The commutator of two elements, a ...
s. Thus reinterpreting it as a (quantum) field equation accurately describing electrons, Heisenberg put matter on the same footing as electromagnetism
In physics, electromagnetism is an interaction that occurs between particles with electric charge. It is the second-strongest of the four fundamental interactions, after the strong force, and it is the dominant force in the interactions of a ...
: as being described by relativistic quantum field equations which allowed the possibility of particle creation and destruction. (Hermann Weyl
Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl, (; 9 November 1885 â 8 December 1955) was a German mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher. Although much of his working life was spent in ZĂŒrich, Switzerland, and then Princeton, New Jersey, he is assoc ...
had already described this in a 1929 letter to Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 â 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...
.)
Matrix mechanics and the Nobel Prize
Heisenberg's paper establishing quantum mechanics has puzzled physicists and historians. His methods assume that the reader is familiar with Kramers-Heisenberg transition probability calculations. The main new idea, non-commuting matrices, is justified only by a rejection of unobservable quantities. It introduces the non-commutative
In mathematics, a binary operation is commutative if changing the order of the operands does not change the result. It is a fundamental property of many binary operations, and many mathematical proofs depend on it. Most familiar as the name o ...
multiplication of matrices
Matrix most commonly refers to:
* ''The Matrix'' (franchise), an American media franchise
** ''The Matrix'', a 1999 science-fiction action film
** "The Matrix", a fictional setting, a virtual reality environment, within ''The Matrix'' (franchis ...
by physical reasoning, based on the correspondence principle
In physics, the correspondence principle states that the behavior of systems described by the theory of quantum mechanics (or by the old quantum theory) reproduces classical physics in the limit of large quantum numbers. In other words, it says t ...
, despite the fact that Heisenberg was not then familiar with the mathematical theory of matrices. The path leading to these results has been reconstructed in MacKinnon, 1977, and the detailed calculations are worked out in Aitchison et al.
In Copenhagen, Heisenberg and Hans Kramers
Hendrik Anthony "Hans" Kramers (17 December 1894 â 24 April 1952) was a Dutch physicist who worked with Niels Bohr to understand how electromagnetic waves interact with matter and made important contributions to quantum mechanics and statistical ...
collaborated on a paper on dispersion, or the scattering from atoms of radiation whose wavelength is larger than the atoms. They showed that the successful formula Kramers had developed earlier could not be based on Bohr orbits, because the transition frequencies are based on level spacings which are not constant. The frequencies which occur in the Fourier transform
A Fourier transform (FT) is a mathematical transform that decomposes functions into frequency components, which are represented by the output of the transform as a function of frequency. Most commonly functions of time or space are transformed, ...
of sharp classical orbits, by contrast, are equally spaced. But these results could be explained by a semi-classical virtual state
In quantum physics, a virtual state is a very short-lived, unobservable quantum state.
In many quantum processes a virtual state is an intermediate state, sometimes described as "imaginary" in a multi-step process that mediates otherwise forbi ...
model: the incoming radiation excites the valence, or outer, electron to a virtual state from which it decays. In a subsequent paper Heisenberg showed that this virtual oscillator model could also explain the polarization of fluorescent radiation.
These two successes, and the continuing failure of the BohrâSommerfeld model
The BohrâSommerfeld model (also known as the Sommerfeld model or BohrâSommerfeld theory) was an extension of the Bohr model to allow elliptical orbits of electrons around an atomic nucleus. BohrâSommerfeld theory is named after Danish ph ...
to explain the outstanding problem of the anomalous Zeeman effect, led Heisenberg to use the virtual oscillator model to try to calculate spectral frequencies. The method proved too difficult to immediately apply to realistic problems, so Heisenberg turned to a simpler example, the anharmonic oscillator
In classical mechanics, anharmonicity is the Deviation (statistics), deviation of a system from being a harmonic oscillator. An oscillator that is not oscillating in simple harmonic motion, harmonic motion is known as an anharmonic oscillator w ...
.
The dipole oscillator consists of a simple harmonic oscillator
In mechanics and physics, simple harmonic motion (sometimes abbreviated ) is a special type of periodic motion of a body resulting from a dynamic equilibrium between an inertial force, proportional to the acceleration of the body away from the ...
, which is thought of as a charged particle
In physics, a charged particle is a particle with an electric charge. It may be an ion, such as a molecule or atom with a surplus or deficit of electrons relative to protons. It can also be an electron or a proton, or another elementary particle, ...
on a spring, perturbed by an external force, like an external charge. The motion of the oscillating charge can be expressed as a Fourier series
A Fourier series () is a summation of harmonically related sinusoidal functions, also known as components or harmonics. The result of the summation is a periodic function whose functional form is determined by the choices of cycle length (or ''p ...
in the frequency of the oscillator. Heisenberg solved for the quantum behavior by two different methods. First, he treated the system with the virtual oscillator method, calculating the transitions between the levels that would be produced by the external source.
He then solved the same problem by treating the anharmonic potential term as a perturbation to the harmonic oscillator and using the perturbation methods
In mathematics and applied mathematics, perturbation theory comprises methods for finding an approximate solution to a problem, by starting from the exact solution of a related, simpler problem. A critical feature of the technique is a middle ...
that he and Born had developed. Both methods led to the same results for the first and the very complicated second order correction terms. This suggested that behind the very complicated calculations lay a consistent scheme.
So Heisenberg set out to formulate these results without any explicit dependence on the virtual oscillator model. To do this, he replaced the Fourier expansions for the spatial coordinates by matrices, matrices which corresponded to the transition coefficients in the virtual oscillator method. He justified this replacement by an appeal to Bohr's correspondence principle and the Pauli doctrine that quantum mechanics must be limited to observables.
On 9 July, Heisenberg gave Born this paper to review and submit for publication. When Born read the paper, he recognized the formulation as one which could be transcribed and extended to the systematic language of matrices, which he had learned from his study under Jakob Rosanes
Jakob Rosanes (also Jacob; 16 August 1842 â 6 January 1922) was a German mathematician who worked on algebraic geometry and invariant theory. He was also a chess master.
Rosanes studied at University of Berlin and the University of Breslau. H ...
at Breslau University. Born, with the help of his assistant and former student Pascual Jordan
Ernst Pascual Jordan (; 18 October 1902 â 31 July 1980) was a German theoretical and mathematical physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He contributed much to the mathematical form of matrix ...
, began immediately to make the transcription and extension, and they submitted their results for publication; the paper was received for publication just 60 days after Heisenberg's paper. A follow-on paper was submitted for publication before the end of the year by all three authors.
Up until this time, matrices were seldom used by physicists; they were considered to belong to the realm of pure mathematics
Pure mathematics is the study of mathematical concepts independently of any application outside mathematics. These concepts may originate in real-world concerns, and the results obtained may later turn out to be useful for practical applications, ...
. Gustav Mie
Gustav Adolf Feodor Wilhelm Ludwig Mie (; 29 September 1868 – 13 February 1957) was a German physicist.
Life
Mie was born in Rostock, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Germany in 1868. From 1886 he studied mathematics and physics at the University of ...
had used them in a paper on electrodynamics in 1912 and Born had used them in his work on the lattice theory of crystals in 1921. While matrices were used in these cases, the algebra of matrices with their multiplication did not enter the picture as they did in the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics.
In 1928, Albert Einstein nominated Heisenberg, Born, and Jordan for the Nobel Prize in Physics
)
, image = Nobel Prize.png
, alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFRâą" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NATâą" then " ...
, The announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1932 was delayed until November 1933. It was at that time that it was announced Heisenberg had won the Prize for 1932 "for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen".[The Nobel Prize in Physics 1932]
. Nobelprize.org. Retrieved on 1 February 2012.Nobel Prize in Physics
)
, image = Nobel Prize.png
, alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFRâą" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NATâą" then " ...
an
1933
â Nobel Prize Presentation Speech.
Interpretation of quantum theory
The development of quantum mechanics, and the apparent contradictory implications in regard to what is "real" had profound philosophical implications, including what scientific observations truly mean. In contrast to Albert Einstein and Louis de Broglie
Louis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie (, also , or ; 15 August 1892 â 19 March 1987) was a French physicist and aristocrat who made groundbreaking contributions to quantum theory. In his 1924 PhD thesis, he postulated the wave na ...
, who were realists who believed that particles had an objectively true momentum and position at all times (even if both could not be measured), Heisenberg was an anti-realist, arguing that direct knowledge of what is "real" was beyond the scope of science. Writing in his book ''The Physicist's Conception of Nature,'' Heisenberg argued that ultimately we only can speak of the ''knowledge'' (numbers in tables) which describe something about particles but we can never have any "true" access to the particles themselves:We can no longer speak of the behaviour of the particle independently of the process of observation. As a final consequence, the natural laws formulated mathematically in quantum theory no longer deal with the elementary particles themselves but with our knowledge of them. Nor is it any longer possible to ask whether or not these particles exist in space and time objectively ...
When we speak of the picture of nature in the exact science of our age, we do not mean a picture of nature so much as a ''picture of our relationships with nature''. ...Science no longer confronts nature as an objective observer, but sees itself as an actor in this interplay between man and nature. The scientific method of analysing, explaining and classifying has become conscious of its limitations, which arise out of the fact that by its intervention science alters and refashions the object of investigation. In other words, method and object can no longer be separated.
''SS'' investigation
Shortly after the discovery of the neutron
The neutron is a subatomic particle, symbol or , which has a neutral (not positive or negative) charge, and a mass slightly greater than that of a proton. Protons and neutrons constitute the nuclei of atoms. Since protons and neutrons beh ...
by James Chadwick
Sir James Chadwick, (20 October 1891 â 24 July 1974) was an English physicist who was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the neutron in 1932. In 1941, he wrote the final draft of the MAUD Report, which inspi ...
in 1932, Heisenberg submitted the first of three papers on his neutron-proton model of the nucleus.[ After ]Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...
came to power in 1933, Heisenberg was attacked in the press as a "White Jew" (i.e. an Aryan
Aryan or Arya (, Indo-Iranian *''arya'') is a term originally used as an ethnocultural self-designation by Indo-Iranians in ancient times, in contrast to the nearby outsiders known as 'non-Aryan' (*''an-arya''). In Ancient India, the term ' ...
who acts like a Jew). Supporters of ''Deutsche Physik
''Deutsche Physik'' (, "German Physics") or Aryan Physics (german: Arische Physik) was a nationalist movement in the German physics community in the early 1930s which had the support of many eminent physicists in Germany. The term was taken ...
'', or German Physics (also known as Aryan Physics), launched vicious attacks against leading theoretical physicists, including Arnold Sommerfeld and Heisenberg.[ From the early 1930s onward, the ]anti-Semitic
Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism.
Antis ...
and anti-theoretical physics movement ''Deutsche Physik'' had concerned itself with quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity
The theory of relativity usually encompasses two interrelated theories by Albert Einstein: special relativity and general relativity, proposed and published in 1905 and 1915, respectively. Special relativity applies to all physical phenomena in ...
. As applied in the university environment, political factors took priority over scholarly ability, even though its two most prominent supporters were the Nobel Laureates in Physics
The Nobel Prize in Physics ( sv, Nobelpriset i fysik) is awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to scientists in the various fields of physics. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the 1895 will and testament, ...
Philipp Lenard
Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard (; hu, LĂ©nĂĄrd FĂŒlöp EduĂĄrd Antal; 7 June 1862 â 20 May 1947) was a Hungarian-born German physicist and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905 for his work on cathode rays and the discovery of m ...
and Johannes Stark
Johannes Stark (, 15 April 1874 â 21 June 1957) was a German physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1919 "for his discovery of the Doppler effect in canal rays and the splitting of spectral lines in electric fields". This phen ...
.
There had been many failed attempts to have Heisenberg appointed as professor at a number of German universities. His attempt to be appointed as successor to Arnold Sommerfeld failed because of opposition by the ''Deutsche Physik'' movement. On 1 April 1935, the eminent theoretical physicist Sommerfeld, Heisenberg's doctoral advisor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-UniversitĂ€t MĂŒnchen
The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-UniversitĂ€t MĂŒnchen) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It is Germany's sixth-oldest university in continuous operatio ...
, achieved emeritus
''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...
status. However, Sommerfeld stayed in his chair during the selection process for his successor, which took until 1 December 1939. The process was lengthy due to academic and political differences between the Munich Faculty's selection and that of the Reich Education Ministry and the supporters of ''Deutsche Physik''.
In 1935, the Munich Faculty drew up a list of candidates to replace Sommerfeld as ordinarius professor of theoretical physics and head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Munich. The three candidates had all been former students of Sommerfeld: Heisenberg, who had received the Nobel Prize in Physics
)
, image = Nobel Prize.png
, alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFRâą" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NATâą" then " ...
; Peter Debye
Peter Joseph William Debye (; ; March 24, 1884 â November 2, 1966) was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
Biography
Early life
Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, D ...
, who had received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry
)
, image = Nobel Prize.png
, alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFRâą" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NATâą" then "M ...
in 1936; and Richard Becker. The Munich Faculty was firmly behind these candidates, with Heisenberg as their first choice. However, supporters of ''Deutsche Physik'' and elements in the REM had their own list of candidates, and the battle dragged on for over four years. During this time, Heisenberg came under vicious attack by the ''Deutsche Physik'' supporters. One attack was published in ''Das Schwarze Korps
''Das Schwarze Korps'' (; German for "The Black Corps") was the official newspaper of the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS). This newspaper was published on Wednesdays and distributed free of charge. All SS members were encouraged to read it. The chief edit ...
'', the newspaper of the '' SS'', headed by Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler (; 7 October 1900 â 23 May 1945) was of the (Protection Squadron; SS), and a leading member of the Nazi Party of Germany. Himmler was one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany and a main architect of th ...
. In this, Heisenberg was called a "White Jew" who should be made to "disappear". These attacks were taken seriously, as Jews were violently attacked and incarcerated. Heisenberg fought back with an editorial and a letter to Himmler, in an attempt to resolve the matter and regain his honour.
At one point, Heisenberg's mother visited Himmler's mother. The two women knew each other, as Heisenberg's maternal grandfather and Himmler's father were rectors and members of a Bavarian hiking club. Eventually, Himmler settled the Heisenberg affair by sending two letters, one to SS GruppenfĂŒhrer
__NOTOC__
''GruppenfĂŒhrer'' (, ) was an early paramilitary rank of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), first created in 1925 as a senior rank of the SA. Since then, the term ''GruppenfĂŒhrer'' is also used for leaders of groups/teams of the police, fire de ...
Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich ( ; ; 7 March 1904 â 4 June 1942) was a high-ranking German SS and police official during the Nazi era and a principal architect of the Holocaust.
He was chief of the Reich Security Main Office (inclu ...
and one to Heisenberg, both on 21 July 1938. In the letter to Heydrich, Himmler said Germany could not afford to lose or silence Heisenberg, as he would be useful for teaching a generation of scientists. To Heisenberg, Himmler said the letter came on recommendation of his family and he cautioned Heisenberg to make a distinction between professional physics research results and the personal and political attitudes of the involved scientists.
Wilhelm MĂŒller
Johann Ludwig Wilhelm MĂŒller (7 October 1794 â 30 September 1827) was a German lyric poet, best known as the author of ''Die schöne MĂŒllerin'' (1823) and ''Winterreise'' (1828), which Franz Schubert later set to music as song cycles.
Life
...
replaced Sommerfeld at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. MĂŒller was not a theoretical physicist, had not published in a physics journal, and was not a member of the German Physical Society
The German Physical Society (German: , DPG) is the oldest organisation of physicists. The DPG's worldwide membership is cited as 60,547, as of 2019, making it the largest physics society in the world. It holds an annual conference () and multiple ...
. His appointment was considered a travesty and detrimental to educating theoretical physicists.[
The three investigators who led the SS investigation of Heisenberg had training in physics. Indeed, Heisenberg had participated in the doctoral examination of one of them at the ]UniversitÀt Leipzig
Leipzig University (german: UniversitÀt Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest University, universities and the List of universities in Germany#Universities by years of existence, second-oldest university (by conse ...
. The most influential of the three was Johannes Juilfs
Johannes Wilhelm Heinrich Juilfs, also known by the alias Mathias Jules, (15 December 1911 – 1995) was a German theoretical and experimental physicist. He was a member of the '' Sturmabteilung'' (SA) and then, in 1933, of the ''Schutzstaffel' ...
. During their investigation, they became supporters of Heisenberg as well as his position against the ideological policies of the ''Deutsche Physik'' movement in theoretical physics and academia.
German nuclear weapons program
Pre-war work on physics
In mid-1936, Heisenberg presented his theory of cosmic-ray
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own ...
showers in two papers. Four more papers appeared in the next two years.
In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn
Otto Hahn (; 8 March 1879 â 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner ...
and Fritz Strassmann
Friedrich Wilhelm Strassmann (; 22 February 1902 â 22 April 1980) was a German chemist who, with Otto Hahn in December 1938, identified the element barium as a product of the bombardment of uranium with neutrons. Their observation was the key ...
sent a manuscript to '' The Natural Sciences'' reporting they had detected the element barium
Barium is a chemical element with the symbol Ba and atomic number 56. It is the fifth element in group 2 and is a soft, silvery alkaline earth metal. Because of its high chemical reactivity, barium is never found in nature as a free element.
Th ...
after bombarding uranium
Uranium is a chemical element with the symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Uranium is weak ...
with neutrons and Otto Hahn concluded a ''bursting'' of the uranium nucleus; simultaneously, Hahn communicated these results to his friend Lise Meitner
Elise Meitner ( , ; 7 November 1878 â 27 October 1968) was an Austrian-Swedish physicist who was one of those responsible for the discovery of the element protactinium and nuclear fission. While working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on rad ...
, who had in July of that year fled to the Netherlands and then went to Sweden. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch
Otto Robert Frisch FRS (1 October 1904 â 22 September 1979) was an Austrian-born British physicist who worked on nuclear physics. With Lise Meitner he advanced the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission (coining the term) and firs ...
, correctly interpreted Hahn's and Strassmann's results as being nuclear fission
Nuclear fission is a reaction in which the nucleus of an atom splits into two or more smaller nuclei. The fission process often produces gamma photons, and releases a very large amount of energy even by the energetic standards of radio ...
. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.
In June 1939, Heisenberg traveled to the United States in June and July, visiting Samuel Abraham Goudsmit
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (July 11, 1902 – December 4, 1978) was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925.
Life and career
Goudsmit was born in The Hague, Nethe ...
at the University of Michigan
, mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth"
, former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817â1821)
, budget = $10.3 billion (2021)
, endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
in Ann Arbor
Anne, alternatively spelled Ann, is a form of the Latin female given name Anna (name), Anna. This in turn is a representation of the Hebrew Hannah (given name), Hannah, which means 'favour' or 'grace'. Related names include Annie (given name), ...
. However, Heisenberg refused an invitation to emigrate to the United States. He did not see Goudsmit again until six years later, when Goudsmit was the chief scientific advisor to the American Operation Alsos
The Alsos Mission was an organized effort by a team of British and United States military, scientific, and intelligence personnel to discover enemy scientific developments during World War II. Its chief focus was on the German nuclear energy pro ...
at the close of World War II.[
]
Membership in the Uranverein
The German nuclear weapons program
The Uranverein ( en, "Uranium Club") or Uranprojekt ( en, "Uranium Project") was the name given to the project in Germany to research nuclear technology, including nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, during World War II. It went through seve ...
, known as ''Uranverein'', was formed on 1 September 1939, the day World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countriesâincluding all of the great powersâforming two opposin ...
began. The ''Heereswaffenamt'' (HWA, Army Ordnance Office) had squeezed the ''Reichsforschungsrat The Reichsforschungsrat was created in Germany in 1936 under the Education Ministry for the purpose of centralized planning of all basic and applied research, with the exception of aeronautical research. It was reorganized in 1942 and placed under t ...
'' (RFR, Reich Research Council) out of the ''Reichserziehungsministerium
The Reich Ministry of Science, Education and Culture (german: , also unofficially known as the "Reich Education Ministry" (german: ), or "REM") existed from 1934 until 1945 under the leadership of Bernhard Rust and was responsible for unifying t ...
'' (REM, Reich Ministry of Education) and started the formal German nuclear energy project under military auspices. The project had its first meeting on 16 September 1939. The meeting was organized by Kurt Diebner
Kurt Diebner (13 May 1905 â 13 July 1964) was a German nuclear physicist who is well known for directing and administrating the German nuclear energy project, a secretive program aiming to build nuclear weapons for Nazi Germany during World War ...
, advisor to the HWA, and held in Berlin. The invitees included Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 â 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...
, Siegfried FlĂŒgge
Siegfried FlĂŒgge (16 March 1912, in Dresden – 15 December 1997, in Hinterzarten) was a German theoretical physicist who made contributions to nuclear physics and the theoretical basis for nuclear weapons. He worked on the German nuclear ene ...
, Hans Geiger
Johannes Wilhelm "Hans" Geiger (; ; 30 September 1882 â 24 September 1945) was a German physicist. He is best known as the co-inventor of the detector component of the Geiger counter and for the GeigerâMarsden experiment which discover ...
, Otto Hahn
Otto Hahn (; 8 March 1879 â 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the fields of radioactivity and radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and father of nuclear fission. Hahn and Lise Meitner ...
, Paul Harteck
Paul Karl Maria Harteck (20 July 190222 January 1985) was an Austrian physical chemist. In 1945 under Operation Epsilon in "the big sweep" throughout Germany, Harteck was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces for suspicion of ...
, Gerhard Hoffmann
Gerhard Hoffmann (4 August 1880 â 18 June 1945) was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he contributed to the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club.
Education
Hoffmann studied at the University of Götting ...
, Josef Mattauch
Josef Mattauch (21 November 1895 â 10 August 1976) was a nuclear physicist and chemist. He was known for the development of the Mattauch-Herzog double-focusing mass spectrometer, for his work on the investigation of isotopic abundances using mas ...
and Georg Stetter
Georg Carl Stetter (23 December 1895 â 14 July 1988) was an Austrian-German nuclear physicist. Stetter was Director of the Second Physics Institute of the University of Vienna. He was a principal member of the German nuclear energy project, also ...
. A second meeting was held soon thereafter and included Heisenberg, Klaus Clusius
Klaus Paul Alfred Clusius (19 March 1903 â 28 May 1963) was a German physical chemist from Breslau (WrocĆaw), Silesia. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; he worked on isotope ...
, Robert Döpel
Georg Robert Döpel (3 December 1895 – 2 December 1982) was a German experimental nuclear physicist. He was a participant in a group known as the " first ''Uranverein''", which was spawned by a meeting conducted by the ''Reichserziehungsmin ...
and Carl Friedrich von WeizsÀcker
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von WeizsĂ€cker (; 28 June 1912 â 28 April 2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under ...
. The ''Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut fĂŒr Physik'' (KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics) in Berlin-Dahlem
Dahlem ( or ) is a locality of the Steglitz-Zehlendorf borough in southwestern Berlin. Until Berlin's 2001 administrative reform it was a part of the former borough of Zehlendorf. It is located between the mansion settlements of Grunewald and L ...
, was placed under HWA authority, with Diebner as the administrative director, and the military control of the nuclear research commenced. During the period when Diebner administered the KWIP under the HWA program, considerable personal and professional animosity developed between Diebner and Heisenberg's inner circle, which included Karl Wirtz
Karl Eugen Julius Wirtz (24 April 1910 â 12 February 1994) was a German nuclear physicist, born in Cologne. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Eps ...
and Carl Friedrich von WeizsÀcker
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von WeizsĂ€cker (; 28 June 1912 â 28 April 2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under ...
.
At a scientific conference on 26â28 February 1942 at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, called by the Army Weapons Office, Heisenberg presented a lecture to Reichs officials on energy acquisition from nuclear fission. The lecture, entitled "Die theoretischen Grundlagen fĂŒr die Energiegewinnung aus der Uranspaltung" ("The theoretical basis for energy generation from uranium fission") was, as Heisenberg confessed after the Second World War in a letter to Samuel Goudsmit
Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (July 11, 1902 – December 4, 1978) was a Dutch-American physicist famous for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925.
Life and career
Goudsmit was born in The Hague, Neth ...
, "adapted to the intellectual level of a Reichs Minister". Heisenberg lectured on the enormous energy potential of nuclear fission, stating that 250 million electron volts could be released through the fission of an atomic nucleus. Heisenberg stressed that pure U-235 had to be obtained to achieve a chain reaction. He explored various ways of obtaining isotope in its pure form, including uranium enrichment and an alternative layered method of normal uranium and a moderator in a machine. This machine, he noted, could be used in practical ways to fuel vehicles, ships and submarines. Heisenberg stressed the importance of the Army Weapons Office's financial and material support for this scientific endeavour. A second scientific conference followed. Lectures were heard on problems of modern physics with decisive importance for the national defense and economy. The conference was attended by Bernhard Rust
Bernhard Rust (30 September 1883 â 8 May 1945) was Minister of Science, Education and National Culture ( Reichserziehungsminister) in Nazi Germany.Claudia Koonz, ''The Nazi Conscience'', p 134 A combination of school administrator and zealous ...
, the Reichs Minister of Science, Education and National Culture. At the conference Reichs Minister Rust decided to take the nuclear project away from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. The Reichs Research Council was to take on the project. In April 1942 the army returned the Physics Institute to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, naming Heisenberg as Director at the Institute. With this appointment at the KWIP, Heisenberg obtained his first professorship.[ ]Peter Debye
Peter Joseph William Debye (; ; March 24, 1884 â November 2, 1966) was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
Biography
Early life
Born Petrus Josephus Wilhelmus Debije in Maastricht, Netherlands, D ...
was still director of the institute, but had gone on leave to the United States after he had refused to become a German citizen when the HWA took administrative control of the KWIP. Heisenberg still also had his department of physics at the University of Leipzig where work had been done for the ''Uranverein'' by Robert Döpel
Georg Robert Döpel (3 December 1895 – 2 December 1982) was a German experimental nuclear physicist. He was a participant in a group known as the " first ''Uranverein''", which was spawned by a meeting conducted by the ''Reichserziehungsmin ...
and his wife Klara Döpel.[
On 4 June 1942, Heisenberg was summoned to report to ]Albert Speer
Berthold Konrad Hermann Albert Speer (; ; 19 March 1905 â 1 September 1981) was a German architect who served as the Minister of Armaments and War Production in Nazi Germany during most of World War II. A close ally of Adolf Hitler, he ...
, Germany's Minister of Armaments, on the prospects for converting the Uranverein's research toward developing nuclear weapon
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions ( thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bom ...
s. During the meeting, Heisenberg told Speer that a bomb could not be built before 1945, because it would require significant monetary resources and number of personnel.
After the Uranverein project was placed under the leadership of the Reichs Research Council, it focused on nuclear power
Nuclear power is the use of nuclear reactions to produce electricity. Nuclear power can be obtained from nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion reactions. Presently, the vast majority of electricity from nuclear power is produced b ...
production and thus maintained its ''kriegswichtig'' (importance for the war) status; funding therefore continued from the military. The nuclear power project was broken down into the following main areas: uranium
Uranium is a chemical element with the symbol U and atomic number 92. It is a silvery-grey metal in the actinide series of the periodic table. A uranium atom has 92 protons and 92 electrons, of which 6 are valence electrons. Uranium is weak ...
and heavy water production, uranium isotope separation
Isotope separation is the process of concentrating specific isotopes of a chemical element by removing other isotopes. The use of the nuclides produced is varied. The largest variety is used in research (e.g. in chemistry where atoms of "marker" n ...
and the ''Uranmaschine'' (uranium machine, i.e., nuclear reactor
A nuclear reactor is a device used to initiate and control a fission nuclear chain reaction or nuclear fusion reactions. Nuclear reactors are used at nuclear power plants for electricity generation and in nuclear marine propulsion. Heat from nu ...
). The project was then essentially split up between a number of institutes, where the directors dominated the research and set their own research agendas.[ The point in 1942, when the army relinquished its control of the German nuclear weapons program, was the zenith of the project relative to the number of personnel. About 70 scientists worked for the program, with about 40 devoting more than half their time to nuclear fission research. After 1942, the number of scientists working on applied nuclear fission diminished dramatically. Many of the scientists not working with the main institutes stopped working on nuclear fission and devoted their efforts to more pressing war-related work.
In September 1942, Heisenberg submitted his first paper of a three-part series on the scattering matrix, or ]S-matrix
In physics, the ''S''-matrix or scattering matrix relates the initial state and the final state of a physical system undergoing a scattering process. It is used in quantum mechanics, scattering theory and quantum field theory (QFT).
More forma ...
, in elementary particle physics
Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) an ...
. The first two papers were published in 1943 and the third in 1944. The S-matrix described only the states of incident particles in a collision process, the states of those emerging from the collision, and stable bound state
Bound or bounds may refer to:
Mathematics
* Bound variable
* Upper and lower bounds, observed limits of mathematical functions
Physics
* Bound state, a particle that has a tendency to remain localized in one or more regions of space
Geography
*B ...
s; there would be no reference to the intervening states. This was the same precedent as he followed in 1925 in what turned out to be the foundation of the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics through only the use of observables.
In February 1943, Heisenberg was appointed to the Chair for Theoretical Physics at the ''Friedrich-Wilhelms-UniversitÀt'' (today, the Humboldt-UniversitÀt zu Berlin
Humboldt-UniversitÀt zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-UniversitÀt zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...
). In April, his election to the ''PreuĂische Akademie der Wissenschaften'' (Prussian Academy of Sciences
The Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences (german: Königlich-PreuĂische Akademie der Wissenschaften) was an academy established in Berlin, Germany on 11 July 1700, four years after the Prussian Academy of Arts, or "Arts Academy," to which "Berlin ...
) was approved. That same month, he moved his family to their retreat in Urfeld Urfeld am Walchensee is a village in the municipality of Kochel am See in the district of Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen in Bavaria, Germany. It lies on the northwest shore of Lake Walchensee.Gudelius, Jost: ''Die Jachenau''. Jachenau 2008, , S. 139
Fa ...
as Allied bombing increased in Berlin. In the summer, he dispatched the first of his staff at the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut fĂŒr Physik'' to Hechingen
Hechingen ( Swabian: ''HĂ€chenga'') is a town in central Baden-WĂŒrttemberg, Germany. It is situated about south of the state capital of Stuttgart and north of Lake Constance and the Swiss border.
Geography
The town lies at the foot of the ...
and its neighboring town of Haigerloch
Haigerloch is a town in the north-western part of the Swabian Alb in Germany.
Geography Geographical location
Haigerloch lies at between 430 and 550 metres elevation in the valley of the Eyach river, which forms two loops in a steep shelly limest ...
, on the edge of the Black Forest
The Black Forest (german: Schwarzwald ) is a large forested mountain range in the state of Baden-WĂŒrttemberg in southwest Germany, bounded by the Rhine Valley to the west and south and close to the borders with France and Switzerland. It is t ...
, for the same reasons. From 18â26 October, he travelled to German-occupied Netherlands
Despite Dutch neutrality, Nazi Germany invaded the Netherlands on 10 May 1940 as part of Fall Gelb (Case Yellow). On 15 May 1940, one day after the bombing of Rotterdam, the Dutch forces surrendered. The Dutch government and the royal family re ...
. In December 1943, Heisenberg visited German-occupied Poland
German-occupied Poland during World War II consisted of two major parts with different types of administration.
The Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany following the invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War IIânearly a quarter of the ...
.[
From 24 January to 4 February 1944, Heisenberg travelled to occupied Copenhagen, after the German army confiscated ]Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics
The Niels Bohr Institute (Danish: ''Niels Bohr Institutet'') is a research institute of the University of Copenhagen. The research of the institute spans astronomy, geophysics, nanotechnology, particle physics, quantum mechanics and biophysics. ...
. He made a short return trip in April. In December, Heisenberg lectured in neutral Switzerland
During World War I and World War II, Switzerland maintained armed neutrality, and was not invaded by its neighbors, in part because of its topography, much of which is mountainous. Germany was a threat and Switzerland built a powerful defense. I ...
.[ The United States ]Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the intelligence agency of the United States during World War II. The OSS was formed as an agency of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branc ...
sent agent Moe Berg
Morris Berg (March 2, 1902 – May 29, 1972) was an American catcher and coach in Major League Baseball, who later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Although he played 15 seasons in the major leagues, ...
to attend the lecture carrying a pistol, with orders to shoot Heisenberg if his lecture indicated that Germany was close to completing an atomic bomb.
In January 1945, Heisenberg, with most of the rest of his staff, moved from the ''Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut fĂŒr Physik'' to the facilities in the Black Forest.[
]
Post-Second World War
1945: Alsos Mission
The Alsos Mission was an Allied effort to determine if the Germans had an atomic bomb program and to exploit German atomic related facilities, research, material resources, and scientific personnel for the benefit of the US. Personnel on this operation generally swept into areas which had just come under control of the Allied military forces, but sometimes they operated in areas still under control by German forces.[ Pash, Boris T. (1969) ''The Alsos Mission''. Award. pp. 219â241.] Berlin had been a location of many German scientific research facilities. To limit casualties and loss of equipment, many of these facilities were dispersed to other locations in the latter years of the war. The ''Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut fĂŒr Physik'' (KWIP, Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics) had been bombed so it had mostly been moved in 1943 and 1944 to Hechingen
Hechingen ( Swabian: ''HĂ€chenga'') is a town in central Baden-WĂŒrttemberg, Germany. It is situated about south of the state capital of Stuttgart and north of Lake Constance and the Swiss border.
Geography
The town lies at the foot of the ...
and its neighboring town of Haigerloch
Haigerloch is a town in the north-western part of the Swabian Alb in Germany.
Geography Geographical location
Haigerloch lies at between 430 and 550 metres elevation in the valley of the Eyach river, which forms two loops in a steep shelly limest ...
, on the edge of the Black Forest
The Black Forest (german: Schwarzwald ) is a large forested mountain range in the state of Baden-WĂŒrttemberg in southwest Germany, bounded by the Rhine Valley to the west and south and close to the borders with France and Switzerland. It is t ...
, which eventually became included in the French occupation zone. This allowed the American task force of the Alsos Mission to take into custody a large number of German scientists associated with nuclear research.
On 30 March, the Alsos Mission reached Heidelberg
Heidelberg (; Palatine German language, Palatine German: ''Heidlberg'') is a city in the States of Germany, German state of Baden-WĂŒrttemberg, situated on the river Neckar in south-west Germany. As of the 2016 census, its population was 159,914 ...
, where important scientists were captured including Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 â 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...
, Richard Kuhn
Richard Johann Kuhn (; 3 December 1900 â 1 August 1967) was an Austrian-German biochemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1938 "for his work on carotenoids and vitamins".
Biography
Early life
Kuhn was born in Vienna, Austria ...
, Philipp Lenard
Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard (; hu, LĂ©nĂĄrd FĂŒlöp EduĂĄrd Antal; 7 June 1862 â 20 May 1947) was a Hungarian-born German physicist and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905 for his work on cathode rays and the discovery of m ...
, and Wolfgang Gertner. Their interrogation revealed that Otto Hahn was at his laboratory in Tailfingen, while Heisenberg and Max von Laue
Max Theodor Felix von Laue (; 9 October 1879 â 24 April 1960) was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals.
In addition to his scientific endeavors with cont ...
were at Heisenberg's laboratory in Hechingen
Hechingen ( Swabian: ''HĂ€chenga'') is a town in central Baden-WĂŒrttemberg, Germany. It is situated about south of the state capital of Stuttgart and north of Lake Constance and the Swiss border.
Geography
The town lies at the foot of the ...
, and that the experimental natural uranium reactor that Heisenberg's team had built in Berlin had been moved to Haigerloch. Thereafter, the main focus of the Alsos Mission was on these nuclear facilities in the WĂŒrttemberg
WĂŒrttemberg ( ; ) is a historical German territory roughly corresponding to the cultural and linguistic region of Swabia. The main town of the region is Stuttgart.
Together with Baden and Hohenzollern, two other historical territories, WĂŒrt ...
area. Heisenberg was smuggled out from Urfeld, on 3 May 1945, in an alpine operation in territory still under control by elite German forces. He was taken to Heidelberg, where, on 5 May, he met Goudsmit for the first time since the Ann Arbor visit in 1939. Germany surrendered just two days later. Heisenberg would not see his family again for eight months, as he was moved across France and Belgium and flown to England on 3 July 1945.[
]
1945: Reaction to Hiroshima
Nine of the prominent German scientists who published reports in '' Nuclear Physics Research Reports'' as members of the ''Uranverein'' were captured by Operation Alsos and incarcerated in England under Operation Epsilon
Operation Epsilon was the codename of a program in which Allied forces near the end of World War II detained ten German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany's nuclear program. The scientists were captured between May 1 and ...
. Ten German scientists, including Heisenberg, were held at Farm Hall
A farm (also called an Agriculture, agricultural holding) is an area of land that is devoted primarily to Agriculture, agricultural processes with the primary objective of producing food and other crops; it is the basic facility in food produ ...
in England. The facility had been a safe house
A safe house (also spelled safehouse) is, in a generic sense, a secret place for sanctuary or suitable to hide people from the law, hostile actors or actions, or from retribution, threats or perceived danger. It may also be a metaphor.
Histori ...
of the British foreign intelligence MI6
The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 ( Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of human intelligenc ...
. During their detention, their conversations were recorded. Conversations thought to be of intelligence value were transcribed and translated into English. The transcripts were released in 1992. On 6 August 1945, the scientists at Farm Hall learned from media reports that the USA had dropped an atomic bomb in Hiroshima
is the capital of Hiroshima Prefecture in Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 1,199,391. The gross domestic product (GDP) in Greater Hiroshima, Hiroshima Urban Employment Area, was US$61.3 billion as of 2010. Kazumi Matsui h ...
, Japan
Japan ( ja, æ„æŹ, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
. At first, there was disbelief that a bomb had been built and dropped. In the weeks that followed, the German scientists discussed how the USA might have built the bomb.
The Farm Hall transcripts
Operation Epsilon was the codename of a program in which Allies of World War II, Allied forces near the end of World War II detained ten Germany, German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany's German nuclear energy project, nu ...
reveal that Heisenberg, along with other physicists interned at Farm Hall including Otto Hahn and Carl Friedrich von WeizsÀcker
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von WeizsĂ€cker (; 28 June 1912 â 28 April 2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under ...
, were glad the Allies had won World War II. Heisenberg told other scientists that he had never contemplated a bomb, only an atomic pile to produce energy. The morality of creating a bomb for the Nazis was also discussed. Only a few of the scientists expressed genuine horror at the prospect of nuclear weapons, and Heisenberg himself was cautious in discussing the matter. On the failure of the German nuclear weapons program to build an atomic bomb, Heisenberg remarked, "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
Executive positions at German research institutions
On 3 January 1946, the ten Operation Epsilon
Operation Epsilon was the codename of a program in which Allied forces near the end of World War II detained ten German scientists who were thought to have worked on Nazi Germany's nuclear program. The scientists were captured between May 1 and ...
detainees were transported to Alswede
Alswede is a village in the East Westphalian borough of LĂŒbbecke in Minden-LĂŒbbecke district in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Politics
* The parish chair of Alswede is GĂŒnther Vullriede.
* The local historian is Helmut Woe ...
in Germany. Heisenberg settled in Göttingen, which was in the British zone of Allied-occupied Germany
Germany was already de facto occupied by the Allies from the real fall of Nazi Germany in World War II on 8 May 1945 to the establishment of the East Germany on 7 October 1949. The Allies (United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and France ...
. Heisenberg immediately began to promote scientific research in Germany. Following the Kaiser Wilhelm Society
The Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science (German: ''Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften'') was a German scientific institution established in the German Empire in 1911. Its functions were taken over by ...
's obliteration by the Allied Control Council
The Allied Control Council or Allied Control Authority (german: Alliierter Kontrollrat) and also referred to as the Four Powers (), was the governing body of the Allied Occupation Zones in Germany and Allied-occupied Austria after the end of Wo ...
and the establishment of the Max Planck Society
The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science (german: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften e. V.; abbreviated MPG) is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes. ...
in the British zone, Heisenberg became the director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics
The Max Planck Institute for Physics (MPP) is a physics institute in Munich, Germany that specializes in high energy physics and astroparticle physics. It is part of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and is also known as the Werner Heisenberg Institu ...
. Max von Laue
Max Theodor Felix von Laue (; 9 October 1879 â 24 April 1960) was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals.
In addition to his scientific endeavors with cont ...
was appointed vice director, while Karl Wirtz
Karl Eugen Julius Wirtz (24 April 1910 â 12 February 1994) was a German nuclear physicist, born in Cologne. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Eps ...
, Carl Friedrich von WeizsÀcker
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von WeizsĂ€cker (; 28 June 1912 â 28 April 2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under ...
and Ludwig Biermann
Ludwig Franz Benedikt Biermann (March 13, 1907 in Hamm – January 12, 1986 in MĂŒnchen) was a German astronomer, obtaining his Ph.D. from Göttingen University in 1932.
He made important contributions to astrophysics and plasma physics, di ...
joined to help Heisenberg establish the institute. Heinz Billing
Heinz Billing (7 April 1914 â 4 January 2017) was a German physicist and computer scientist, widely considered a pioneer in the construction of computer systems and computer data storage, who built a prototype laser interferometric gravitatio ...
joined in 1950 to promote the development of electronic computing
Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, e ...
. The core research focus of the institute was cosmic radiation
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles or clusters of particles (primarily represented by protons or atomic nuclei) that move through space at nearly the speed of light. They originate from the Sun, from outside of the Solar System in our own ...
. The institute held a colloquium every Saturday morning.
Heisenberg together with was instrumental in the establishment of the Forschungsrat (research council). Heisenberg envisaged for this council to promote the dialogue between the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated between ...
and the scientific community based in Germany.[ Heisenberg was appointed president of the ''Forschungsrat''. In 1951, the organization was fused with the ]Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft The ''Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft'' (Emergency Association of German Science) or NG was founded on 30 October 1920 on the initiative of leading members of the ''PreuĂische Akademie der Wissenschaften'' (Prussian Academy of Sciences, ...
(Emergency Association of German Science) and that same year renamed the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
The German Research Foundation (german: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft ; DFG ) is a German research funding organization, which functions as a self-governing institution for the promotion of science and research in the Federal Republic of Germ ...
(German Research Foundation). Following the merger, Heisenberg was appointed to the presidium.[
In 1958, the Max-Planck-Institut fĂŒr Physik was moved to Munich, expanded, and renamed Max-Planck-Institut fĂŒr Physik und Astrophysik (MPIFA). In the interim, Heisenberg and the astrophysicist ]Ludwig Biermann
Ludwig Franz Benedikt Biermann (March 13, 1907 in Hamm – January 12, 1986 in MĂŒnchen) was a German astronomer, obtaining his Ph.D. from Göttingen University in 1932.
He made important contributions to astrophysics and plasma physics, di ...
were co-directors of MPIFA. Heisenberg also became an ''ordentlicher Professor'' (ordinarius professor) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-UniversitĂ€t MĂŒnchen
The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-UniversitĂ€t MĂŒnchen) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It is Germany's sixth-oldest university in continuous operatio ...
. Heisenberg was the sole director of MPIFA from 1960 to 1970. Heisenberg resigned his directorship of the MPIFA on 31 December 1970.[
]
Promotion of international scientific cooperation
In 1951, Heisenberg agreed to become the scientific representative of the Federal Republic of Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated between ...
at the UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...
conference, with the aim of establishing a European laboratory for nuclear physics. Heisenberg's aim was to build a large particle accelerator
A particle accelerator is a machine that uses electromagnetic fields to propel charged particles to very high speeds and energies, and to contain them in well-defined beams.
Large accelerators are used for fundamental research in particle ...
, drawing on the resources and technical skills of scientists across the Western Bloc
The Western Bloc, also known as the Free Bloc, the Capitalist Bloc, the American Bloc, and the NATO Bloc, was a coalition of countries that were officially allied with the United States during the Cold War of 1947â1991. It was spearheaded by ...
. On 1 July 1953 Heisenberg signed the convention that established CERN
The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...
on behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany. Although he was asked to become CERN's founding scientific director, he declined. Instead, he was appointed chair of CERN's science policy committee and went on to determine the scientific program at CERN.
In December 1953, Heisenberg became the president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (german: Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung) is a foundation established by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and funded by the Federal Foreign Office, the Federal Ministry of Education and Resear ...
. During his tenure as president 550 Humboldt scholars from 78 nations received scientific research grants. Heisenberg resigned as president shortly before his death.
Research interests
In 1946, the German scientist Heinz Pose
Rudolf Heinz Pose (10 April 1905 – 13 November 1975) was a German nuclear physicist who worked in the Soviet atomic bomb project.
He did pioneering work which contributed to the understanding nuclear energy levels. He worked on the German nu ...
, head of Laboratory V in Obninsk
Obninsk (russian: ĐÌĐ±ĐœĐžĐœŃĐș) is a city in Kaluga Oblast, Russia, located on the bank of the Protva River southwest of Moscow and northeast of Kaluga. Population:
History
The history of Obninsk began in 1945 when the First Research In ...
, wrote a letter to Heisenberg inviting him to work in the USSR. The letter lauded the working conditions in the USSR and the available resources, as well as the favorable attitude of the Soviets towards German scientists. A courier hand delivered the recruitment letter, dated 18 July 1946, to Heisenberg; Heisenberg politely declined. In 1947, Heisenberg presented lectures in Cambridge
Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...
, Edinburgh
Edinburgh ( ; gd, DĂčn Ăideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...
and Bristol
Bristol () is a city, ceremonial county and unitary authority in England. Situated on the River Avon, it is bordered by the ceremonial counties of Gloucestershire to the north and Somerset to the south. Bristol is the most populous city in ...
. Heisenberg contributed to the understanding of the phenomenon of superconductivity
Superconductivity is a set of physical properties observed in certain materials where electrical resistance vanishes and magnetic flux fields are expelled from the material. Any material exhibiting these properties is a superconductor. Unlike ...
with a paper in 1947 and two papers in 1948, one of them with Max von Laue
Max Theodor Felix von Laue (; 9 October 1879 â 24 April 1960) was a German physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1914 for his discovery of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals.
In addition to his scientific endeavors with cont ...
.[
In the period shortly after World War II, Heisenberg briefly returned to the subject of his doctoral thesis, turbulence. Three papers were published in 1948 and one in 1950.][ In the post-war period Heisenberg continued his interests in cosmic-ray showers with considerations on multiple production of ]meson
In particle physics, a meson ( or ) is a type of hadronic subatomic particle composed of an equal number of quarks and antiquarks, usually one of each, bound together by the strong interaction. Because mesons are composed of quark subparticles ...
s. He published three papers in 1949, two in 1952, and one in 1955.
In late 1955 to early 1956, Heisenberg gave the Gifford Lectures
The Gifford Lectures () are an annual series of lectures which were established in 1887 by the will of Adam Gifford, Lord Gifford. Their purpose is to "promote and diffuse the study of natural theology in the widest sense of the term â in o ...
at St Andrews University
(Aien aristeuein)
, motto_lang = grc
, mottoeng = Ever to ExcelorEver to be the Best
, established =
, type = Public research university
Ancient university
, endowment ...
, in Scotland, on the intellectual history
Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual histor ...
of physics. The lectures were later published as ''Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science''. During 1956 and 1957, Heisenberg was the chairman of the ''Arbeitskreis Kernphysik'' (Nuclear Physics Working Group) of the ''Fachkommission II "Forschung und Nachwuchs"'' (Commission II "Research and Growth") of the ''Deutsche Atomkommission'' (DAtK, German Atomic Energy Commission). Other members of the Nuclear Physics Working Group in both 1956 and 1957 were: Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 â 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...
, Hans Kopfermann
Hans Kopfermann (26 April 1895, in Breckenheim near Wiesbaden â 28 January 1963, in Heidelberg) was a German atomic and nuclear physicist. He devoted his entire career to spectroscopic investigations, and he did pioneering work in measuring ...
(vice-chairman), Fritz Bopp
Friedrich Arnold "Fritz" Bopp (27 December 1909 â 14 November 1987) was a German theoretical physicist who contributed to nuclear physics and quantum field theory. He worked at the '' Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut fĂŒr Physik'' and with the ''Uranve ...
, Wolfgang Gentner
Wolfgang Gentner (23 July 1906 in Frankfurt am Main â 4 September 1980 in Heidelberg) was a German experimental nuclear physicist.
Gentner received his doctorate in 1930 from the University of Frankfurt. From 1932 to 1935 he had a fellowship whi ...
, Otto Haxel
Otto Haxel (2 April 1909, in Neu-Ulm â 26 February 1998, in Heidelberg) was a German nuclear physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project. After the war, he was on the staff of the Max Planck Institute for Phy ...
, Willibald Jentschke
Willibald Jentschke (Vienna, Austria-Hungary, 6 December 1911 â Göttingen, Germany, 11 March 2002) was an Austrian-German experimental nuclear physicist.
During World War II, he made contributions to the German nuclear energy project.
Afte ...
, Heinz Maier-Leibnitz
Heinz Maier-Leibnitz (28 March 1911, in Esslingen am Neckar â 16 December 2000, in Allensbach) was a German physicist. He made contributions to nuclear spectroscopy, coincidence measurement techniques, radioactive tracers for biochemistry and me ...
, Josef Mattauch
Josef Mattauch (21 November 1895 â 10 August 1976) was a nuclear physicist and chemist. He was known for the development of the Mattauch-Herzog double-focusing mass spectrometer, for his work on the investigation of isotopic abundances using mas ...
, , Wilhelm Walcher
Wilhelm Walcher (7 July 1910 in Kaufbeuren – 9 November 2005 in Marburg) was a German experimental physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranium Club; he worked on mass spectrometers ...
and Carl Friedrich von WeizsÀcker
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von WeizsĂ€cker (; 28 June 1912 â 28 April 2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under ...
. Wolfgang Paul
Wolfgang Paul (; 10 August 1913 – 7 December 1993) was a German physicist, who co-developed the non-magnetic quadrupole mass filter which laid the foundation for what is now called an ion trap. He shared one-half of the Nobel Prize in Ph ...
was also a member of the group during 1957.
In 1957, Heisenberg was a signatory of the Göttinger Manifest, taking a public stand against the Federal Republic of Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated between ...
arming itself with nuclear weapons
A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions (thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb ...
. Heisenberg, like Pascual Jordan
Ernst Pascual Jordan (; 18 October 1902 â 31 July 1980) was a German theoretical and mathematical physicist who made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. He contributed much to the mathematical form of matrix ...
, thought politicians would ignore this statement by nuclear scientists. But Heisenberg believed that the Göttinger Manifest would "influence public opinion" which politicians would have to take into account. He wrote to Walther Gerlach
Walther Gerlach (1 August 1889 â 10 August 1979) was a German physicist who co-discovered, through laboratory experiment, spin quantization in a magnetic field, the SternâGerlach effect. The experiment was conceived by Otto Stern in 1921 an ...
: "We will probably have to keep coming back to this question in public for a long time because of the danger that public opinion will slacken." In 1961 Heisenberg signed the Memorandum of TĂŒbingen The Memorandum of TĂŒbingen (German:''TĂŒbinger Memorandum'') was a memorandum dealing with West German foreign policy, written by eight prominent German Protestant academics and scientists. It was sent to the German Bundestag in 1961. The memoran ...
alongside a group of scientists who had been brought together by Carl Friedrich von WeizsÀcker
Carl Friedrich Freiherr von WeizsĂ€cker (; 28 June 1912 â 28 April 2007) was a German physicist and philosopher. He was the longest-living member of the team which performed nuclear research in Germany during the Second World War, under ...
and Ludwig Raiser Ludwig Raiser (27 October 1904 â 13 June 1980) was a German legal scholar.
In 1961, he was one of the signatories of the Memorandum of TĂŒbingen on West German foreign policy.
He was President of the Synod of the Evangelical Church in Germany f ...
. A public discussion between scientists and politicians ensued. As prominent politicians, authors and socialites joined the debate on nuclear weapons, the signatories of the memorandum took a stand against "the full-time intellectual nonconformists".
From 1957 onwards, Heisenberg was interested in and the process of nuclear fusion
Nuclear fusion is a reaction in which two or more atomic nuclei are combined to form one or more different atomic nuclei and subatomic particles ( neutrons or protons). The difference in mass between the reactants and products is manifest ...
. He also collaborated with the International Institute of Atomic Physics in Geneva
Geneva ( ; french: GenĂšve ) frp, GenĂšva ; german: link=no, Genf ; it, Ginevra ; rm, Genevra is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland (after ZĂŒrich) and the most populous city of Romandy, the French-speaki ...
. He was a member of the Institute's scientific policy committee, and for several years was the Committee's chair.[ He was one of the eight signatories of the ]Memorandum of TĂŒbingen The Memorandum of TĂŒbingen (German:''TĂŒbinger Memorandum'') was a memorandum dealing with West German foreign policy, written by eight prominent German Protestant academics and scientists. It was sent to the German Bundestag in 1961. The memoran ...
which called for the recognition of the OderâNeiĂe line as the official border between Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
and Poland
Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous ...
and spoke against a possible nuclear armament of West Germany
West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 O ...
.
In 1973, Heisenberg gave a lecture at Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
on the historical development of the concepts of quantum theory
Quantum theory may refer to:
Science
*Quantum mechanics, a major field of physics
*Old quantum theory, predating modern quantum mechanics
* Quantum field theory, an area of quantum mechanics that includes:
** Quantum electrodynamics
** Quantum ch ...
. On 24 March 1973 Heisenberg gave a speech before the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, accepting the Romano Guardini Prize. An English translation of his speech was published under the title "Scientific and Religious Truth", a quotation from which appears in a later section of this article.[
]
Philosophy and worldview
Heisenberg admired Eastern philosophy
Eastern philosophy or Asian philosophy includes the various philosophies that originated in East and South Asia, including Chinese philosophy, Japanese philosophy, Korean philosophy, and Vietnamese philosophy; which are dominant in East Asia, ...
and saw parallels between it and quantum mechanics, describing himself as in "complete agreement" with the book ''The Tao of Physics
''The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism'' is a 1975 book by physicist Fritjof Capra. A bestseller in the United States, it has been translated into 23 languages. Capra summarized his mot ...
''. Heisenberg even went as far to state that after conversations with Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore (; bn, àŠ°àŠŹà§àŠšà§àŠŠà§àŠ°àŠšàŠŸàŠ„ àŠ àŠŸàŠà§àŠ°; 7 May 1861 â 7 August 1941) was a Bengali polymath who worked as a poet, writer, playwright, composer, philosopher, social reformer and painter. He resh ...
about Indian philosophy
Indian philosophy refers to philosophical traditions of the Indian subcontinent. A traditional Hindu classification divides Ästika and nÄstika schools of philosophy, depending on one of three alternate criteria: whether it believes the Veda ...
"some of the ideas that seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense".
Regarding the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 â 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is considere ...
, Heisenberg disliked ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'' but he liked "very much the later ideas of Wittgenstein and his philosophy about language."
Heisenberg, a devout Christian, wrote: "We can console ourselves that the good Lord God would know the position of the [subatomic] particles, thus He would let the causality principle continue to have validity", in his last letter to Albert Einstein. Einstein continued to maintain that quantum physics must be incomplete because it implies that the universe is indeterminate at a fundamental level.
In lectures given in the 1950s and later published as ''Physics and Philosophy'', Heisenberg contended that scientific advances were leading to cultural conflicts. He stated that modern physics is "part of a general historical process that tends toward a unification and a widening of our present world".
When Heisenberg accepted the in 1974, he gave a speech, which he later published under the title ''Scientific and Religious Truth''. He mused:
Autobiography and death
Heisenberg's son, Martin Heisenberg, became a neurobiologist at the University of WĂŒrzburg, while his son Jochen Heisenberg became a physics professor at the University of New Hampshire.
In his late sixties, Heisenberg penned his autobiography for the mass market. In 1969 the book was published in Germany, in early 1971 it was published in English and in the years thereafter in a string of other languages. Heisenberg had initiated the project in 1966, when his public lectures increasingly turned to the subjects of philosophy and religion. Heisenberg had sent the manuscript for a textbook on the unified field theory to the Hirzel Verlag and John Wiley & Sons for publication. This manuscript, he wrote to one of his publishers, was the preparatory work for his autobiography. He structured his autobiography in themes, covering: 1) The goal of exact science, 2) The problematic of language in atomic physics, 3) Abstraction in mathematics and science, 4) The divisibility of matter or Kant's antinomy, 5) The basic symmetry and its substantiation, and 6) Science and religion.
Heisenberg wrote his memoirs as a chain of conversations, covering the course of his life. The book became a popular success, but was regarded as troublesome by historians of science. In the preface Heisenberg wrote that he had abridged historical events, to make them more concise. At the time of publication it was reviewed by Paul Forman in the journal ''Science'' with the comment "Now here is a memoir in the form of rationally reconstructed dialogue. And the dialogue as Galileo well knew, is itself a most insidious literary device: lively, entertaining, and especially suited for insinuating opinions while yet evading responsibility for them." Few scientific memoirs had been published, but Konrad Lorenz and Adolf Portmann had penned popular books that conveyed scholarship to a wide audience. Heisenberg worked on his autobiography and published it with the Piper Verlag in Munich. Heisenberg initially proposed the title ''GesprÀche im Umkreis der Atomphysik'' (''Conversations on atomic physics''). The autobiography was published eventually under the title ''Der Teil und das Ganze'' (''The part and the whole''). The 1971 English translation was published under the title ''Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations''.
Heisenberg died of kidney cancer at his home, on 1 February 1976. The next evening, his colleagues and friends walked in remembrance from the Institute of Physics to his home, lit a candle and placed it in front of his door. Heisenberg is buried in Munich Waldfriedhof.
In 1980 his widow, Elisabeth Heisenberg, published ''The Political Life of an Apolitical Person'' (de, ''Das politische Leben eines Unpolitischen''). In it she characterized Heisenberg as "first and foremost, a spontaneous person, thereafter a brilliant scientist, next a highly talented artist, and only in the fourth place, from a sense of duty, homo politicus."
Honors and awards
Heisenberg was awarded a number of honors:[
* Honorary degree, Honorary doctorates from the Université libre de Bruxelles, University of Brussels, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Technological University of Karlsruhe, and Eötvös Lorånd University.
* Bavarian Order of Merit
* Romano Guardini Prize]
* Bundesverdienstkreuz, Grand Cross for Federal Service with Star
* Pour le MĂ©rite, Knight of the Order of Merit (Civil Class)
* Elected a List of Fellows of the Royal Society elected in 1955, Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1955
* Member of the Academies of Sciences of Göttingen, Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, Sweden, Romania, Norway, Spain, The Netherlands (1939), Rome (Pontifical), the ''German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina'' (Halle), the Accademia dei Lincei (Rome), and the American Academy of Sciences.
* 1932 â Nobel Prize in Physics
)
, image = Nobel Prize.png
, alt = A golden medallion with an embossed image of a bearded man facing left in profile. To the left of the man is the text "ALFRâą" then "NOBEL", and on the right, the text (smaller) "NATâą" then " ...
"for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen".[
* 1933 â ''Max Planck Medal, Max-Planck-Medaille'' of the ''Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft''
]
Research reports on nuclear physics
The following reports were published in ''Kernphysikalische Forschungsberichte'' (''Research Reports in Nuclear Physics''), an internal publication of the German ''German nuclear energy project, Uranverein''. The reports were classified Top Secret, they had very limited distribution, and the authors were not allowed to keep copies. The reports were confiscated under the Allied Operation Alsos
The Alsos Mission was an organized effort by a team of British and United States military, scientific, and intelligence personnel to discover enemy scientific developments during World War II. Its chief focus was on the German nuclear energy pro ...
and sent to the United States Atomic Energy Commission for evaluation. In 1971, the reports were declassified and returned to Germany. The reports are available at the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center and the American Institute of Physics.
* Werner Heisenberg ''Die Möglichkeit der technischer Energiegewinnung aus der Uranspaltung'' G-39 (6 December 1939)
* Werner Heisenberg ''Bericht ĂŒber die Möglichkeit technischer Energiegewinnung aus der Uranspaltung (II)'' G-40 (29 February 1940)
* Robert Döpel, K. Döpel, and Werner Heisenberg ''Bestimmung der DiffusionslÀnge thermischer Neutronen in schwerem Wasser'' G-23 (7 August 1940)
*Robert Döpel
Georg Robert Döpel (3 December 1895 – 2 December 1982) was a German experimental nuclear physicist. He was a participant in a group known as the " first ''Uranverein''", which was spawned by a meeting conducted by the ''Reichserziehungsmin ...
, Klara Döpel, K. Döpel, and Werner Heisenberg ''Bestimmung der DiffusionslÀnge thermischer Neutronen in PrÀparat 38''[''PrÀparat 38'' was the cover name for Uranate, uranium oxide; se]
Deutsches Museum
G-22 (5 December 1940)
* Robert Döpel, K. Döpel, and Werner Heisenberg ''Versuche mit Schichtenanordnungen von D2O und 38'' G-75 (28 October 1941)
* Werner Heisenberg ''Ăber die Möglichkeit der Energieerzeugung mit Hilfe des Isotops 238'' G-92 (1941)
* Werner Heisenberg ''Bericht ĂŒber Versuche mit Schichtenanordnungen von PrĂ€parat 38 und Paraffin am Kaiser Wilhelm Institut fĂŒr Physik in Berlin-Dahlem'' G-93 (May 1941)
*Fritz Bopp
Friedrich Arnold "Fritz" Bopp (27 December 1909 â 14 November 1987) was a German theoretical physicist who contributed to nuclear physics and quantum field theory. He worked at the '' Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut fĂŒr Physik'' and with the ''Uranve ...
, Erich Fischer, Werner Heisenberg, Carl Friedrich von WeizsÀcker, Carl-Friedrich von WeizsÀcker, and Karl Wirtz
Karl Eugen Julius Wirtz (24 April 1910 â 12 February 1994) was a German nuclear physicist, born in Cologne. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Eps ...
''Untersuchungen mit neuen Schichtenanordnungen aus U-metall und Paraffin'' G-127 (March 1942)
* Robert Döpel ''Bericht ĂŒber UnfĂ€lle beim Umgang mit Uranmetall'' G-135 (9 July 1942)
* Werner Heisenberg ''Bemerkungen zu dem geplanten halbtechnischen Versuch mit 1,5 to D2O und 3 to 38-Metall'' G-161 (31 July 1942)
* Werner Heisenberg, Fritz Bopp, Erich Fischer, Carl Friedrich von WeizsÀcker, Carl-Friedrich von WeizsÀcker, and Karl Wirtz ''Messungen an Schichtenanordnungen aus 38-Metall und Paraffin'' G-162 (30 October 1942)
* Robert Döpel, K. Döpel, and Werner Heisenberg ''Der experimentelle Nachweis der effektiven Neutronenvermehrung in einem Kugel-Schichten-System aus D2O und Uran-Metall'' G-136 (July 1942)
* Werner Heisenberg ''Die Energiegewinnung aus der Atomkernspaltung'' G-217 (6 May 1943)
*Fritz Bopp
Friedrich Arnold "Fritz" Bopp (27 December 1909 â 14 November 1987) was a German theoretical physicist who contributed to nuclear physics and quantum field theory. He worked at the '' Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut fĂŒr Physik'' and with the ''Uranve ...
, Walther Bothe
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe (; 8 January 1891 â 8 February 1957) was a German nuclear physicist, who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954 with Max Born.
In 1913, he joined the newly created Laboratory for Radioactivity at the Reich Physi ...
, Erich Fischer, Erwin FĂŒnfer, Werner Heisenberg, Oskar Ritter, O. Ritter, and Karl Wirtz
Karl Eugen Julius Wirtz (24 April 1910 â 12 February 1994) was a German nuclear physicist, born in Cologne. He was arrested by the allied British and American Armed Forces and incarcerated at Farm Hall for six months in 1945 under Operation Eps ...
''Bericht ĂŒber einen Versuch mit 1.5 to D2O und U und 40 cm KohlerĂŒckstreumantel (B7)'' G-300 (3 January 1945)
* Robert Döpel, K. Döpel, and Werner Heisenberg ''Die Neutronenvermehrung in einem D2O-38-Metallschichtensystem'' G-373 (March 1942)
Other research publications
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* The paper was received on 29 July 1925. [English translation in: ] This is the first paper in the famous trilogy which launched the matrix mechanics
Matrix mechanics is a formulation of quantum mechanics created by Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan in 1925. It was the first conceptually autonomous and logically consistent formulation of quantum mechanics. Its account of quantum j ...
formulation of quantum mechanics.
* The paper was received on 27 September 1925. [English translation in: ] This is the second paper in the famous trilogy which launched the matrix mechanics
Matrix mechanics is a formulation of quantum mechanics created by Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan in 1925. It was the first conceptually autonomous and logically consistent formulation of quantum mechanics. Its account of quantum j ...
formulation of quantum mechanics.
* The paper was received on 16 November 1925. [English translation in: ] This is the third paper in the famous trilogy which launched the matrix mechanics
Matrix mechanics is a formulation of quantum mechanics created by Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan in 1925. It was the first conceptually autonomous and logically consistent formulation of quantum mechanics. Its account of quantum j ...
formulation of quantum mechanics.
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* The author was cited as being at Leipzig. The paper was received on 21 June 1934.
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* The authors were cited as being at Leipzig. The paper was received on 22 December 1935. A translation of this paper has been done by W. Korolevski and H. Kleinert: arxiv:physics/0605038v1, arXiv:physics/0605038v1.
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* The substance of this article was presented by Heisenberg in a lecture at Harvard University.
Published books
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* (iarchive:PhysicsPhilosophy, full text of 1958 version)
In popular culture
Heisenberg's surname is used as the primary Secret identity, alias for Walter White (Breaking Bad), Walter White (Played by Bryan Cranston), the lead character in AMC (TV channel), AMC's crime drama series ''Breaking Bad'' throughout White's transformation from a high-school chemistry teacher into a methamphetamine, meth cook and a drug kingpin. In the spin-off prequel series ''Better Call Saul'', a character named Werner directs the construction of the meth lab belonging to antagonist Gus Fring that Walt cooks in for much of ''Breaking Bad''.
Werner Heisenberg was the target of an assassination by spy Moe Berg
Morris Berg (March 2, 1902 – May 29, 1972) was an American catcher and coach in Major League Baseball, who later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Although he played 15 seasons in the major leagues, ...
in the film ''The Catcher Was a Spy (film), The Catcher Was a Spy'', based on real events.
Heisenberg is credited with building the atomic bomb used by the Axis in the Amazon Prime TV series adaptation of the novel ''The Man in the High Castle'' by Philip K. Dick. Atomic bombs in this universe are referred to as Heisenberg Devices.
Daniel Craig portrayed Heisenberg in the 2002 film ''Copenhagen (2002 film), Copenhagen,'' an adaptation of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen (play), play of that name.
Heisenberg is the namesake of ''Resident Evil Village'' secondary antagonist Karl Heisenberg. Heisenberg's research on ferromagnetism served as inspiration for the character's magnetic abilities.
See also
* List of things named after Werner Heisenberg
* List of German inventors and discoverers
* ''The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory''
References
Footnotes
Citations
Bibliography
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See also
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* The author was cited as being at Leipzig. The paper was received on 21 June 1934.
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* The authors were cited as being at Leipzig. The paper was received on 22 December 1935. A translation of this paper has been done by W. Korolevski and H. Kleinert: arxiv:physics/0605038v1, arXiv:physics/0605038v1.
* [This book is a collection of 121 primary German documents relating to physics under National Socialism. The documents have been translated and annotated, and there is a lengthy introduction to put them into perspective.]
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External links
Annotated Bibliography for Werner Heisenberg
from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
* MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, MacTutor Biography
Werner Karl Heisenberg
Heisenberg/Uncertainty
biographical exhibit by American Institute of Physics.
Key Participants: Werner Heisenberg
â ''Linus Pauling and the Nature of the Chemical Bond: A Documentary History''
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