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Werner Karl Heisenberg ( December 5 , 1901 – February 1 , 1976 ) was a celebrated German Physicist and Nobel Laureate , one of the founders of Quantum Mechanics . He was born in Würzburg , Germany and died in Munich . Heisenberg was the head of Germany 's Nuclear Energy Program , though the nature of this project, and his work in this capacity, has been heavily debated. He is most well-known for discovering the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle . LIFE Heisenberg was born in Würzburg, Germany, the son of Dr. August Heisenberg and Annie Wecklein. He attended school in Munich and studied Physics at the University Of Munich under, amongst others, Arnold Sommerfeld and Wilhelm Wien . As a young man, Heisenberg was a Scout , an enthusiastic Hiker and walker and greatly loved the outdoor life. In 1922 he studied physics at Göttingen where he was taught by Max Born and David Hilbert . His Ph.D. was from the University of Munich, following which, he joined Max Born at the University Of Göttingen . In 1924 he began work on Quantum Mechanics with Niels Bohr , at the University Of Copenhagen , where in 1926 he was given a Lecturership in Theoretical Physics. In 1927 he took the chair in theoretical physics at Leipzig . He won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his work on Quantum Mechanics . In 1937 he married Elizabeth Schumacher. He decided to remain in Germany during the Second World War , despite serious problems with the Nazi government, which called him a "white Jew" for his support of his Jewish colleagues and the theories of Albert Einstein. His wartime work is discussed in a separate section below. In 1941 he was appointed Professor of Physics at the University Of Berlin . At the end of the Second World War he, and other German physicists, were captured by allied troops as part of Operation Alsos , which targeted the capture of Axis Nuclear Scientists , which was part of a wider effort to capture the Axis powers' scientists for the military application of their knowledge in the looming Cold War . He was detained in a wire-tapped house in England, along with other nuclear scientists, in an attempt to find out how close the Germans had been to developing an atomic bomb. After the end of WWII, Heisenberg toured various countries giving lectures including England , the United States and Scotland before moving to work in Munich at the Max Planck Institute for Physics. In 1955-56 he gave the Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews University , which resulted in the book ''Physics and Philosophy''. In 1957 Heisenberg together with Otto Hahn , Max Von Laue , Carl Friedrich Von Weizsäcker and Max Born formulated and signed a protest against the reinstatement of the German Armed Forces and world-wide nuclear armaments, the so-called " Göttingen Declaration Of The German Nuclear Physicists ". He died on February 1 , 1976 . QUANTUM MECHANICS As a student, he met Niels Bohr in Göttingen in 1922 . A fruitful collaboration developed between the two. He invented Matrix Mechanics , the first formalization of quantum mechanics in 1925 . His Uncertainty Principle , discovered in 1927 , states that the simultaneous determination of two paired quantities, for example the position and momentum of a particle, has an unavoidable uncertainty. Together with Bohr, he formulated the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. He received the Nobel Prize In Physics in 1932 "for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen". During the early days of the Nazi regime in Germany, Heisenberg was harassed as a "White Jew" for teaching the theories of Albert Einstein in contrast with the Nazi-sanctioned '' Deutsche Physik '' movement. After a character investigation that Heisenberg himself instigated and passed, SS chief Heinrich Himmler banned any further political attacks on the physicist. WORK DURING THE WAR Nuclear Fission was discovered in Germany in 1939 . Heisenberg remained in Germany during World War II , working under the Nazi regime. He belonged to a team led by Walther Bothe to develop one of Germany's many Nuclear Weapon / Nuclear Power programs, but the extent of his cooperation in the development of weapons has been a subject of much controversy. Heisenberg's work consisted of various efforts to create sustained fission reactions and possibly the creation of a Plutonium breeder reactor at the cave in Hechingen. A rival atomic bomb project was led by Kurt Diebner for Heerswaffenamt, who, with Paul Harteck worked on Uranium enrichment and a uranium-based atomic bomb. Neither team was successful. After the war, Heisenberg and other German physicists were taken by the British to Farm Hall , where their conversations were monitored. From the transcripts, it appeared that Heisenberg had miscalculated the Critical Mass of uranium required for an atomic bomb—by not taking into account the "drunkard's walk" trajectory of the slow Neutrons emitted, he had grossly overestimated the amount necessary, and concluded that it was too great to construct a deliverable bomb—and for this reason at least he did not push for a full development program with as much vigor as he probably would have without this miscalculation. Further covert eavesdropping revealed that, on hearing of the Allied bombing of Hiroshima , he was at first convinced it was a propaganda trick, so sure was he that the critical mass was impracticably large. Some historians have questioned the reliability of the transcripts, as Heisenberg probably knew he was being monitored; others believe that his shock could not have been feigned, or that the detonation over Japan changed everything and made him feel free to finally speak with candor because his own efforts were now of no consequence. Heisenberg may have revealed the atomic bomb program's existence to Bohr during a visit in Copenhagen in September 1941. After the meeting, the lifelong friendship between Bohr and Heisenberg ended abruptly. Bohr later joined the Manhattan Project . It is known that Reich's munitions minister Albert Speer was Heisenberg's strongest ally in the Nazi leadership and that Speer attempted to divert research funds away from nuclear weaponry. Speer came into conflict with other Nazi leaders for this stance. For this reason the SS ensured that funding was also given to rival nuclear projects without Speer's knowledge. It has been speculated that Heisenberg had moral qualms and tried to slow down the project. Heisenberg himself may have attempted to paint this picture after the war, and Thomas Power's book ''Heisenberg's War'' and Michael Frayn 's play '' Copenhagen '' adopted this interpretation. This is partly based on the fact that Heisenberg did not champion the project to Albert Speer in a way which got it much attention or funding (which Samuel Goudsmit of the Alsos project interpreted as being partially because Heisenberg himself was not fully aware of the feasibility of an atomic bomb). At best, he tried to hinder the German project; at worst, he was just unable to create an atomic bomb. A passage from a 1943 letter from Heisenberg to Dutch scientist Hendrik Casimir indicates that at the very least Heisenberg was a strong German nationalist:
In February 2002, following the attention generated by ''Copenhagen'', a letter written by Bohr to Heisenberg in 1957 (but never sent) was released by the Niels Bohr Archive. In it, an angry Bohr relates that Heisenberg, in their 1941 conversation, did not express any moral problems with the bomb-making project, that Heisenberg had spent the past two years working almost exclusively on it, and that he was convinced that the atomic bomb would eventually decide the war. Bohr was responding to the recent publication of journalist Robert Jungk 's ''Brighter Than a Thousand Suns'', which painted Heisenberg as having single-handedly and purposely derailed the German project for moral reasons. To justify the claim, Jungk had printed an excerpt from a personal letter from Heisenberg. The excerpt, however, was taken heavily out of context, and in the full letter Heisenberg was far more demure about whether he had taken a strong moral stance. After reading the excerpt, Bohr was understandably flustered that Heisenberg was (apparently) claiming to have purposely derailed the Nazi bomb project, as it did not match his own perception of Heisenberg's war work at all. Some historians of science have taken this letter as evidence that the previous interpretation of Heisenberg's resistance was wrong, but others have argued that Bohr profoundly misunderstood Heisenberg's intentions at the 1941 meeting, or that his reaction to Jungk's work was overly passionate. As a piece of evidence, the letter has had little effect. The Bohr letters had been sought after by historians for many years, but remained off limits on the wishes of the family; part of the reason they were released was to satisfy curiosity about whether they contained any drastically new information (they did not). It is also thought that Italian scientist Gian Carlo Wick approached Heisenberg in January 1944 as an emissary for the OSS as part of Operation Sunrise, to negotiate the capitulation of Nazi scientists to the Alsos mission. Allied intelligence through Stockholm continued to sound the alarm about Nazi uranium research right up to war's end, but this was part of Diebner's project, not Heisenberg's. LOOKING BACK "He lies somewhere here" has been his epitaph (''original german'': "Er liegt irgendwo hier"). According to an ? And why Turbulence ? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." This story is probably untrue, as it bears an uncanny likeness to the following reported incident: The difficulty of explaining and studying Turbulence in fluids was wittily expressed in 1932 by the British physicist Horace Lamb , who, in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, reportedly said, "I am an old man now, and when I die and go to heaven there are two matters on which I hope for enlightenment. One is Quantum Electrodynamics , and the other is the turbulent motion of Fluid s. And about the former I am rather optimistic." {Link without Title} In his book ''The 100'', Michael H. Hart ranks Heisenberg as the 46th most influential person in history. REFERENCES
One author wrote that Heisenberg was an unexpectedly good essayist. EXTERNAL LINKS
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