WERNER HEISENBERG: BIOGRAPHY, DISCOVERY, CONTRIBUTIONS, WORKS - SCIENCE - 2024

Werner Heisenberg (1901 - 1976) was a German physicist and philosopher known for being the man who managed to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices, in addition to creating the uncertainty principle. Thanks to these discoveries, he managed to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932.

In addition, he contributed with contributions to the theories of hydrodynamics of turbulent fluids, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles, among other research.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R57262 / UnknownUnknown author / CC-BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

He was one of the scientists to intervene in the Nazi German nuclear weapons project during World War II. When the war ended, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Willhelm Institute for Physics.

He served as director until the institution moved to Munich, where it expanded and was renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics.

Heisenberg was president of the German Research Council, the Commission for Atomic Physics, the Nuclear Physics Working Group, and president of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Biography

Early years and studies

Werner Karl Heisenberg was born on December 5, 1901 in Würzburg, Germany. He was the son of Kaspar Ernst August Heisenberg, a high school teacher of classical languages ​​who became Germany's only medieval and modern Greek studies teacher in the university system. His mother was a woman named Annie Wecklein.

He began his studies in physics and mathematics at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and the Georg-August University in Göttingen between 1920 and 1923.

The professor and physicist, Arnold Sommerfeld, observed his best students and knew of Heisenberg's interest in the theories of anatomical physics of the Dane Niels Bohr; the professor took him to the Bohr festival in June 1922.

Finally, in 1923, he received his doctorate in Munich under Sommerfeld and completed his habilitation the following year.

The subject of Heisenberg's doctoral thesis was suggested by Sommerfeld himself. He sought to address the idea of ​​turbulence seen as a pattern of fluid movement characterized by sudden changes in pressure and flow velocity.

More specifically, Heisenberg approached the problem of stability by using several specific equations. During his youth, he was a member of an association of German Scouts and part of the German Youth Movement.

Beginning of his career

Between 1924 and 1927, Heisenberg was noted for being a privatdozent (university professor of title), in Göttingen.

From September 17, 1924, to May 1 of the following year, he conducted research together with the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, thanks to a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation Board of International Education.

In 1925, over a period of six months, he developed a formulation of quantum mechanics; a fairly complete mathematical implementation, accompanied by the German physicists Max Born and Pascual Jordan.

While in Copenhagen, in 1927 Heisenberg managed to develop his uncertainty principle, while working on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics.

After completing his research, on February 23, he wrote a letter to the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli, in which he described such a principle for the first time.

Then, in 1928, he offered an article published in Leipzig where he used the Pauli exclusion principle to solve the mystery of ferromagnetism; a physical phenomenon that produces a magnetic arrangement in the same direction and sense.

At the beginning of the year 1929, Heisenberg and Pauli presented two papers that served to lay the foundations of the relativistic quantum field theory.

Nobel Prize

Werner Heisenberg not only managed to develop the research program to create quantum field theory together with some of his colleagues, but he also managed to work on the theory of the atomic nucleus after the discovery of the neutron in 1932.

In such a project he succeeded in developing a proton-neutron interaction model in an early description that later became known as the strong force.

In 1928, Albert Einstein nominated Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan for the Nobel Prize in Physics. The announcement of the 1932 award was delayed until November 1933.

It was at this time that it was announced that Heisenberg had won the 1932 prize for the creation of quantum mechanics. From Heisenberg's contribution, the allotropic forms of hydrogen have been discovered: that is, the different atomic structures of substances that are simple.

Nazi attacks

The same year that he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933, he saw the rise of the Nazi Party. Nazi policies excluded "non-Aryans", which meant the dismissal of many professors, including: Born, Einstein and other Heisenberg colleagues in Leipzig.

Heisenberg's response to such actions was calm, away from public outcry because he thought the Nazi regime would be short-lived. Heisenberg quickly became an easy target.

A group of radical Nazi physicists promoted the idea of ​​an "Aryan physics" as opposed to "Jewish physics", this being the one related to relativity theories and quantum theories; in fact, Heisenberg was heavily attacked by the Nazi press, calling him a "white Jew."

Sommerfeld had considered leaving Heisenberg as his successor for classes at the University of Munich; however, his bid for the appointment failed due to opposition from the Nazi movement. Heisenberg had been left with a bitter taste after the arbitrary decisions of the Nazis.

Heisenberg in World War II

On September 1, 1939, the German nuclear weapons program was formed, the same day that World War II began. After several meetings, Heisenberg was included and placed as Managing Director.

From February 26 to 28, 1942, Heisenberg gave a scientific lecture to Reich officials on the acquisition of energy from nuclear fission.

In addition, he explained about the enormous energy potential that this type of energy provides. He claimed that 250 million volts of electrons could be released through the fission of an atomic nucleus, so they set out to do the research.

The discovery of nuclear fission was brought to the German spotlight. However, Heisenberg's research group was unsuccessful in producing a reactor or atomic bomb.

Some references have presented Heisenberg as incompetent. Others, on the contrary, have suggested that the delay had been on purpose or that the effort was sabotaged. What was clear is that there were significant errors at various points in the investigation.

According to various references, transcripts from German to English reveal that both Heisenberg and other colleagues were delighted that the Allies were victorious in World War II.

Postwar years and death

Finally in 1946, he resumed his position at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which was soon renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics. In the postwar years, Heisenberg assumed roles as administrator and spokesperson for German science in West Germany, maintaining an apolitical stance.

In 1949, he became the first president of the German Research Council with the intention of promoting his country's science internationally.

Later, in 1953, he became the founding president of the Humboldt Foundation; a government-funded organization that awarded scholarships to foreign scholars to conduct research in Germany.

In the late 1960s, Heisenberg managed to write his autobiography. The book was published in Germany and years later it was translated into English, and then into other languages.

On February 1, 1976, Heisenberg died of kidney and gallbladder cancer. The next day, his colleagues took a walk from the Institute of Physics to his home, placing candles on the front door to pay their respects to the legendary scientist.

Discoveries and contributions

Matrix Mechanics

The first models of quantum mechanics were established by Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and other leading scientists. Later, a group of young physicists elaborated contrary to classical theories, based on experiments and not on intuition, using much more precise languages.

In 1925, Heisenberg was the first to make one of the most complete mathematical formulations of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg's idea was that by means of this equation, the intensities of photons in the various bands of the hydrogen spectrum could be predicted.

This formulation is based on the fact that any system can be described and measured with observations and scientific measurements according to matrix theory. In this sense, matrices are mathematical expressions to relate data from a phenomenon.

Principle of uncertainty

Quantum physics is often confusing, as the definite is replaced with probabilities. For example, a particle can be in one place or another, or even in both at the same time; its location can only be estimated by means of probabilities.

This quantum confusion could be explained thanks to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. In 1927, the German physicist explained his principle by measuring the position and motion of a particle. For example, the momentum of an object is its mass multiplied by its speed.

Given this fact, the uncertainty principle indicates that the position and motion of a particle cannot be known with absolute certainty. Heisenberg claimed that there is a limit to how well the position and momentum of the particle can be known, even using his theory.

For Heisenberg, if you know the position very precisely, you can only have limited information about its momentum.

Neutron-proton model

The proton-electron model presented certain problems. Although it was accepted that the atomic nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons, the nature of the neutron was not clear.

After the discovery of the neutron, Werner Heisenberg and the Soviet-Ukrainian physicist Dmitri Ivanenko, proposed a proton and neutron model for the nucleus, in the year 1932.

The Heisenberg papers address a detailed description of protons and neutrons within the nucleus through quantum mechanics. It also assumed the presence of nuclear electrons apart from neutrons and protons.

More specifically, he assumed that the neutron is a proton-electron compound, for which there is no quantum mechanical explanation.

Although the neutron-proton model solved many problems and answered certain questions, it proved a problem in explaining how electrons could emanate from the nucleus. Still, thanks to these discoveries, the image of the atom changed and significantly accelerated the discoveries of atomic physics.

Plays

The physical principles of quantum theory

The Physical Principles of Quantum Theory was a book written by Werner Heisenberg, first published in 1930 thanks to the University of Chicago. Later, in 1949, a new version was reprinted to success.

The German physicist wrote this book with the intention of discussing quantum mechanics in a simple way, with little technical language to provide a quick understanding of this science.

The book has been cited more than 1,200 times in important official references and sources. The structure of the work is fundamentally based on the quick and easy discussion of quantum theory and its uncertainty principle.

Physics and philosophy

Physics and Philosophy consisted of a seminal work concisely written by Werner Heisenberg in 1958. In this work, Heisenberg explains the events of the revolution in modern physics from the basis of his outstanding articles and contributions.

Heisenberg was characterized by having conducted innumerable lectures and talks on physics throughout his scientific career. In this sense, this work is a compilation of all the talks related to the discoveries of the German scientist: the uncertainty principle and the atomic model.

Physics and beyond

Physics and Beyond was a book written by Werner Heisenberg in 1969, which tells the history of atomic exploration and quantum mechanics from his experience.

The book takes conversations of debates between Heisenberg and other of his colleagues of the time on different scientific subjects. This text includes conversations with Albert Einstein.

The intention of Heisenberg was that the reader could have the experience of listening in person to different recognized physicists, such as Niels Bohr or Max Planck, not only talking about physics, but also about other topics related to philosophy and politics; hence the title of the book.

In addition, the work recounts the emergence of quantum physics and a description of the environment in which they lived, with detailed descriptions of the landscapes and their education in nature characteristic of the time.

References

1. Werner Heisenberg, Richard Beyler, (nd). Taken from Britannica.com
2. Weiner Heisenberg, Famous Scientists Portal, (nd). Taken from famousscientists.org
3. Werner Karl Heisenberg, Portal University of St Andrews, Scotland, (nd). Taken from groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk
4. Werner Heisenberg, Wikipedia in English, (nd). Taken from Wikipedia.org
5. Quantum uncertainty not all in the measurement, Geoff Brumfiel, (2012). Taken from nature.com