Werner Heisenberg

Werner Heisenberg (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics and is best known for asserting the uncertainty principle of quantum theory. In addition, he made important contributions to nuclear physics, quantum field theory, and particle physics.

Heisenberg, along with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, set forth the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics in 1925. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics, and its application especially to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen.

Following World War II, he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, which was soon thereafter renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics. He was director of the institute until it was moved to Munich in 1958, when it was expanded and renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics.

From 1924 to 1927, Heisenberg was a Privatdozent at Göttingen. From 17 September 1924 to 1 May 1925, under an International Education BoardRockefeller Foundation fellowship, Heisenberg went to do research with Niels Bohr, director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen. He returned to Göttingen and with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, over a period of about six months, developed the matrix mechanicsformulation of quantum mechanics. On 1 May 1926, Heisenberg began his appointment as a university lecturer and assistant to Bohr in Copenhagen. It was in Copenhagen, in 1927, that Heisenberg developed his uncertainty principle, while working on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics. On 23 February, Heisenberg wrote a letter to fellow physicist Wolfgang Pauli, in which he first described his new principle. In his paper on the uncertainty principle, Heisenberg used the word "Ungenauigkeit" (imprecision).

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

In 1927, Heisenberg was appointed ordentlicher Professor (ordinarius professor) of theoretical physics and head of the department of physics at the Universität Leipzig; he gave his inaugural lecture on 1 February 1928. In his first paper published from Leipzig, Heisenberg used the Pauli exclusion principle to solve the mystery of ferromagnetism.

In Heisenberg's tenure at Leipzig, the quality of doctoral students, post-graduate and research associates who studied and worked with Heisenberg there is attested to by the acclaim later earned by these people; at various times, they included: Erich Bagge, Felix Bloch, Ugo Fano, Siegfried Flügge, William Vermillion Houston, Friedrich Hund, Robert S. Mulliken, Rudolf Peierls, George Placzek,Isidor Isaac Rabi, Fritz Sauter, John C. Slater, Edward Teller, John Hasbrouck van Vleck, Victor Frederick Weisskopf, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Gregor Wentzel and Clarence Zener.

In early 1929, Heisenberg and Pauli submitted the first of two papers laying the foundation for relativistic quantum field theory. Also in 1929, Heisenberg went on a lecture tour in the United States, Japan, China, and India.

Shortly after the discovery of the neutron by James Chadwick in 1932, Heisenberg submitted the first of three papers on his neutron-proton model of the nucleus. He was awarded the 1932Nobel Prize in Physics.

In 1928, the British mathematical physicist P. A. M. Dirac had derived the relativistic wave equation of quantum mechanics, which implied the existence of positive electrons, later to be namedpositrons. In 1932, from a cloud chamber photograph of cosmic rays, the American physicist Carl David Anderson identified a track as having been made by a positron. In mid-1933, Heisenberg presented his theory of the positron. His thinking on Dirac's theory and further development of the theory were set forth in two papers. The first, Bemerkungen zur Diracschen Theorie des Positrons (Remarks on Dirac's theory of the positron) was published in 1934, and the second, Folgerungen aus der Diracschen Theorie des Positrons (Consequences of Dirac's Theory of the Positron), was published in 1936. In these papers Heisenberg was the first to reinterpret the Dirac equation as a "classical" field equation for any point particle of spin ħ/2, itself subject to quantization conditions involving anti-commutators. Thus reinterpreting it as a (quantum) field equation accurately describing electrons, Heisenberg put matter on the same footing as electromagnetism: as being described by relativistic quantum field equations which allowed the possibility of particle creation and destruction.

In the early 1930s in Germany, the deutsche Physik movement was anti-Semitic and anti-theoretical physics, especially including quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. As applied in the university environment, political factors took priority over the historically applied concept of scholarly ability, even though its two most prominent supporters were the Nobel Laureates in PhysicsPhilipp Lenard and Johannes Stark.

After Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Heisenberg was attacked in the press as a "White Jew" by elements of the deutsche Physik (German Physics) movement for his insistence on teaching about the roles of Jewish scientists. As a result, he came under investigation by the SS. This was over an attempt to appoint Heisenberg as successor to Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich. The issue was resolved in 1938 by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. While Heisenberg was not chosen as Sommerfeld's successor, he was rehabilitated to the physics community during theThird Reich. Nevertheless, supporters of deutsche Physik launched vicious attacks against leading theoretical physicists, including Arnold Sommerfeld and Heisenberg. On 29 June 1936, a National Socialist Party newspaper published a column attacking Heisenberg. On 15 July 1937, he was attacked in a journal of the SS. This was the beginning of what is called the Heisenberg Affair.

In mid-1936, Heisenberg presented his theory of cosmic-ray showers in two papers. Four more papers appeared in the next two years.

Heisenberg’s paper establishing quantum mechanics has puzzled physicists and historians. His methods assume that the reader is familiar with Kramers-Heisenberg transition probability calculations. The main new idea, noncommuting matrices, is justified only by a rejection of unobservable quantities. It introduces the non-commutative multiplication of matrices by physical reasoning, based on the correspondence principle, despite the fact that Heisenberg was not then familiar with the mathematical theory of matrices. The path leading to these results has been reconstructed in MacKinnon, 1977, and the detailed calculations are worked out in Aitchison et al.

In June 1939, Heisenberg bought a summer home for his family in Urfeld, in southern Germany. He also traveled to the United States in June and July, visiting Samuel Abraham Goudsmit, at theUniversity of Michigan in Ann Arbor. However, Heisenberg refused an invitation to emigrate to the United States. He did not see Goudsmit again until six years later, when Goudsmit was the chief scientific advisor to the American Operation Alsos at the close of World War II. Ironically, Heisenberg was arrested under Operation Alsos and detained in England under Operation Epsilon.

In Copenhagen, Heisenberg and H. Kramers collaborated on a paper on dispersion, or the scattering from atoms of radiation whose wavelength is larger than the atoms. They showed that the successful formula Kramers had developed earlier could not be based on Bohr orbits, because the transition frequencies are based on level spacings which are not constant. The frequencies which occur in the Fourier transform of sharp classical orbits, by contrast, are equally spaced. But these results could be explained by a semi-classical Virtual State model: the incoming radiation excites the valence, or outer, electron to a virtual state from which it decays. In a subsequent paper Heisenberg showed that this virtual oscillator model could also explain the polarization of fluorescent radiation.

These two successes, and the continuing failure of the Bohr-Sommerfeld model to explain the outstanding problem of the anomalous Zeeman effect, led Heisenberg to use the virtual oscillator model to try to calculate spectral frequencies. The method proved too difficult to immediately apply to realistic problems, so Heisenberg turned to a simpler example, the anharmonic oscillator.

The dipole oscillator consists of a simple harmonic oscillator, which is thought of as a charged particle on a spring, perturbed by an external force, like an external charge. The motion of the oscillating charge can be expressed as a Fourier series in the frequency of the oscillator. Heisenberg solved for the quantum behavior by two different methods. First, he treated the system with the virtual oscillator method, calculating the transitions between the levels that would be produced by the external source.

He then solved the same problem by treating the anharmonic potential term as a perturbation to the harmonic oscillator and using the perturbation methods that he and Born had developed. Both methods led to the same results for the first and the very complicated second order correction terms. This suggested that behind the very complicated calculations lay a consistent scheme.

So Heisenberg set out to formulate these results without any explicit dependence on the virtual oscillator model. To do this, he replaced the Fourier expansions for the spatial coordinates by matrices, matrices which corresponded to the transition coefficients in the virtual oscillator method. He justified this replacement by an appeal to Bohr’s correspondence principle and the Pauli doctrine that quantum mechanics must be limited to observables.

On 9 July, Heisenberg gave Born this paper to review and submit for publication. When Born read the paper, he recognized the formulation as one which could be transcribed and extended to the systematic language of matrices, which he had learned from his study under Jakob Rosanes at Breslau University. Born, with the help of his assistant and former student Pascual Jordan, began immediately to make the transcription and extension, and they submitted their results for publication; the paper was received for publication just 60 days after Heisenberg's paper. A follow-on paper was submitted for publication before the end of the year by all three authors. (A brief review of Born's role in the development of the matrix mechanics formulation of quantum mechanics along with a discussion of the key formula involving the non-commutivity of the probability amplitudes can be found in an article by Jeremy Bernstein, Max Born and the Quantum Theory. A detailed historical and technical account can be found in Mehra and Rechenberg's book The Historical Development of Quantum Theory. Volume 3. The Formulation of Matrix Mechanics and Its Modifications 1925–1926.)

Up until this time, matrices were seldom used by physicists; they were considered to belong to the realm of pure mathematics. Gustav Mie had used them in a paper on electrodynamics in 1912 and Born had used them in his work on the lattices theory of crystals in 1921. While matrices were used in these cases, the algebra of matrices with their multiplication did not enter the picture as they did in the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics.

Born had learned matrix algebra from Rosanes, as already noted, but Born had also learned Hilbert's theory of integral equations and quadratic forms for an infinite number of variables as was apparent from a citation by Born of Hilbert's work Grundzüge einer allgemeinen Theorie der Linearen Integralgleichungen published in 1912. Jordan, too was well equipped for the task. For a number of years, he had been an assistant to Richard Courant at Göttingen in the preparation of Courant and David Hilbert's book Methoden der mathematischen Physik I, which was published in 1924. This book, fortuitously, contained a great many of the mathematical tools necessary for the continued development of quantum mechanics. In 1926, John von Neumann became assistant to David Hilbert, and he coined the term Hilbert space to describe the algebra and analysis which were used in the development of quantum mechanics.

In 1928, Albert Einstein nominated Heisenberg, Born, and Jordan for the Nobel Prize in Physics, but it was not to be. The announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1932 was delayed until November 1933. It was at that time that it was announced Heisenberg had won the Prize for 1932 "for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen" and Erwin Schrödinger and Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac shared the 1933 Prize "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory". One can rightly ask why Born was not awarded the Prize in 1932 along with Heisenberg – Bernstein gives some speculations on this matter. One of them is related to Jordan joining the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933 and becoming a Storm Trooper. Hence, Jordan's Party affiliations and Jordan's links to Born may have affected Born's chance at the Prize at that time. Bernstein also notes that when Born won the Prize in 1954, Jordan was still alive, and the Prize was awarded for the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics, attributable alone to Born.

In 1939, shortly after the discovery of nuclear fission, the German nuclear energy project, also known as the Uranverein (Uranium Club), was begun. Heisenberg was one of the principal scientists leading research and development in the project.^{[citation needed]}

Heisenberg's reaction to Born for Heisenberg receiving the Prize for 1932 and to Born for Born receiving the Prize in 1954 are also instructive in evaluating whether Born should have shared the Prize with Heisenberg. On 25 November 1933, Born received a letter from Heisenberg in which he said he had been delayed in writing due to a "bad conscience" that he alone had received the Prize "for work done in Göttingen in collaboration – you, Jordan and I." Heisenberg went on to say that Born and Jordan's contribution to quantum mechanics cannot be changed by "a wrong decision from the outside." In 1954, Heisenberg wrote an article honoring Max Planck for his insight in 1900. In the article, Heisenberg credited Born and Jordan for the final mathematical formulation of matrix mechanics and Heisenberg went on to stress how great their contributions were to quantum mechanics, which were not "adequately acknowledged in the public eye."

From 15 to 22 September 1941, Heisenberg traveled to German-occupied Copenhagen to lecture and discuss nuclear research and theoretical physics with Niels Bohr. The meeting, and specifically what it might reveal about Heisenberg's intentions concerning developing nuclear weapons for the Nazi regime, is the subject of the award winning Michael Frayn play titled Copenhagen. Documents relating to the Bohr-Heisenberg meeting were released in 2002 by the Niels Bohr Archive and by the Heisenberg family.

On 26 February 1942, Heisenberg presented a lecture to Reich officials on energy acquisition from nuclear fission, after the Army withdrew most of its funding. The Uranium Club was transferred to the Reich Research Council (RFR) in July 1942. On 4 June 1942, Heisenberg was summoned to report to Albert Speer, Germany's Minister of Armaments, on the prospects for converting the Uranium Club's research toward developing nuclear weapons. During the meeting, Heisenberg told Speer that a bomb could not be built before 1945, and would require significant monetary and manpower resources. Five days later, on 9 June 1942, Adolf Hitler issued a decree for the reorganization of the RFR as a separate legal entity under the Reich Ministry for Armament and Ammunition; the decree appointed Reich Marshall Göring as the president.

In September 1942, Heisenberg submitted his first paper of a three-part series on the scattering matrix, or S-matrix, in elementary particle physics. The first two papers were published in 1943^[and the third in 1944. The S-matrix described only observables, i.e., the states of incident particles in a collision process, the states of those emerging from the collision, and stable bound states; there would be no reference to the intervening states. This was the same precedent as he followed in 1925 in what turned out to be the foundation of the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics through only the use of observables.

In February 1943, Heisenberg was appointed to the Chair for Theoretical Physics at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (today, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). In April, his election to the Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Prussian Academy of Sciences) was approved. That same month, he moved his family to their retreat in Urfeld as Allied bombing increased in Berlin. In the summer, he dispatched the first of his staff at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik to Hechingen and its neighboring town of Haigerloch, on the edge of the Black Forest, for the same reasons. From 18–26 October, he traveled to German-occupied Netherlands. In December 1943, Heisenberg visited German-occupied Poland.

From 24 January to 4 February 1944, Heisenberg traveled to occupied Copenhagen, after the German Army confiscated Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics. He made a short return trip in April. In December, Heisenberg lectured in neutral Switzerland.

In January 1945, Heisenberg vacated the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik with about all of his staff for the facilities in the Black Forest.