Werner Heisenberg

Werner Karl Heisenberg was born in 1901 in Würzburg, Germany, the son of a teacher of classical languages. As a teenager he read Plato's Timaeus while hiking in the Bavarian Alps. He was a Scout leader and an accomplished pianist, and he met his wife Elisabeth Schumacher at a private music recital. He studied physics in Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld, earning his doctorate in 1923, and worked with Max Born at Göttingen and Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. In 1925, suffering from hay fever, he went to the pollen-free island of Helgoland, where he worked out the ideas that became matrix mechanics. In 1927 he published the uncertainty principle and became a professor at Leipzig. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1932. During the Second World War he led theoretical work in the German nuclear program, a role historians still debate. Afterward he directed the Max Planck Institute for Physics and wrote Physics and Philosophy (1958). He died in Munich in 1976.

Werner Heisenberg is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Raised and lived as a Lutheran Christian. Source: Wikipedia

See also: Niels Bohr · Max Planck · Albert Einstein · Plato