Werner Heisenberg (5 December 1901-1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of quantum mechanics.
Biography[]
Werner Heisenberg was born in Wurzburg, Bavaria, German Empire in 1901, and he was raised a Lutheran Christian. He served in the Freikorps during the suppression of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919, and he went on to study physics in Munich and received his doctorate in 1923. Heisenberg published a major breakthrough paper on quantum mechanics in 1925, and he elaborated his matrix formulation of quantum mechanics over the next several years and published the uncertainty principle in 1927. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932 for creating the field of quantum mechanics, and he also studied hydrodynamics, the atomic nucleus, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles. Nazi Germany employed him as one of its principle scientists on its nuclear weapons program during World War II, and, after the war, he helped plan the first West German chemical reactor at Karlsruhe in 1957. He also served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics until 1958, and he directed the ax Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics from 1960 to 1970. He died in Munich in 1976.