Werner Heisenberg and Göttingen: On the occasion of his 100th birthday, December 5.

Werner Heisenberg, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics and, after Albert Einstein, one of the most important German physicists of the 20th century, had multiple connections with Göttingen. Already during his time as a doctoral student with

Werner Heisenberg (ca. 1926)

Sommerfeld in Munich, he spent the winter term 1922/23 in Göttingen with Max Born, the head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics. After obtaining his doctoral degree at the age of 22 in Munich, he returned to Göttingen to become an assistant of Born. It is during this period that, in 1925, he made a break-through to quantum mechanics and laid its foundations in close collaboration with Born and Pascual Jordan. It was here in Göttingen that he also got into contact with Nils Bohr and, subsequently during 1924 and 1926 spent various periods of intensive research at Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, but always returning to his home base Göttingen. In 1927 he published his famous "uncertainty relations" establishing the impossibility of measuring with the same precision both the velocity and the location of a particle. Heisenberg's first period in Göttingen ended in 1927 when he was appointed full professor at the age of 26 at the University of Leipzig.

During the war, Heisenberg worked on the German Uranium project, a research project directed towards the achievement of a controlled nuclear chain reaction. Among historians of science it has been a matter of lively debate whether this program contained options for the development of an atomic bomb.

When after the war the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for Physics in Berlin was transferred to Göttingen, Heisenberg took over its directorship. Among many topics, he developed non-linear spinor theory, in part together with W. Pauli, and which he considered, probably mistakenly, as the fundamental theory for elementary particles.

In 1957, together with other eminent German physicists, Heisenberg signed the "Göttingen declaration" opposing research as well as possession of nuclear weapons on the occasion of chancelor Adenauer's wish to provide "tactical" atomic weapons for the newly created German army. Heisenberg was instrumental in what was then called "the peaceful use of nuclear energy", resulting in the construction of nuclear reactors for research and of power plants for energy generation. Heisenberg's second period in Göttingen ended with the move of the Max-Planck-Institute of Physics to Munich in 1958.

Besides his share in the creation of quantum theory, Heisenberg made outstanding and lasting contributions in many fields such as nuclear physics, ferromagnetism, supraconductivity, relativistic quantum field theory, scattering theory.

Special events:

The Göttingen Physics Colloquium Monday, December 10, 5.15 pm
Armin Hermann: "Werner Heisenberg zum hundertsten Geburtstag"

Theoretical Seminar Thursday, December 13, 2.15 pm
Mark Walker: "Heisenberg und Nationalsozialismus"
(See also: Die Göttinger Erklärung)

Reading: W. Heisenberg: Collected Works (Eds. W. Blum, H.-P. Dürr and H. Rechenberg), Series B. Vol. 1, Springer: Heidelberg 1984.

D. Cassidy: Uncertainty: the life and science of Werner Heisenberg. New York: Freeman 1992.

M. Walker: Nazi science: myth, truth, and the German atomic bomb. New York: Plenum Press: 1995.

Last modified: Fri Dec 7 13:01:56 CET 2001