Werner Heisenberg

BIOGRAPHY Werner Heisenberg was born on 5th December, 1901, at Würzburg. He went to the Maximilian school at Munich until 1920, then he went to the University of Munich to study physics. From 1924 until 1925 he worked with Niels Bohr, at the University of Copenhagen.

In 1926 he was appointed Lecturer in Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen under Niels Bohr. In 1927, when he was only 26, he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Leipzig. It was in Copenhagen, in 1927, that Heisenberg developed his uncertainty principle.

Heisenberg's name will always be associated with his theory of quantum mechanics, published in 1925, when he was only 23 years old. For this theory and the applications of it which resulted especially in the discovery of allotropic forms of hydrogen, Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1932.

His new theory was based only on what can be observed, that is to say, on the radiation emitted by the atom. We cannot, he said, always assign to an electron a position in space at a given time, nor follow it in its orbit, so that we cannot assume that the planetary orbits postulated by Niels Bohr actually exist.

Mechanical quantities, such as position, velocity, etc Mechanical quantities, such as position, velocity, etc. should be represented, not by ordinary numbers, but by abstract mathematical structures called "matrices" and he formulated his new theory in terms of matrix equations.

At the end of the Second World War he, and other German physicists, were taken prisoner by American troops and sent to England. But in 1946 he returned to Germany and reorganized, with his colleagues, the Institute for Physics at Göttingen. This Institute was, in 1948, renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics.

He gave a lecture in 1956 in Istanbul. In 1941, he tried to convince Bohr to develop and construct a nuclear bomb to support Germany, but because of moral reasons Bohr did not except.

Uncertainty Principle states that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known.

According to Heisenberg its meaning is that it is impossible to determine simultaneously both the position and velocity of an electron or any other particle with any degree of accuracy or certainty.

References http://nobelprize.org http://en.wikipedia.org http://www.canlibilimi.com