Werner Karl Heisenberg (* December 5th, 1901 in Würzburg, Bavaria) is a German Physicist.
In 1925, Heisenberg was the first one to give a mathematical Formulation of Quantum mechanics. In 1927, he formulated his Unschärferelation (uncertainty principle), which was named after him, and which makes one of the most fundamental statements of Quantum mechanics – that is, the fact certain Measurements of a particle, e.g. its place and its Impulse, can't be measured at the same time with exact precision. For the foundation of Quantum mechanics, he was distinguished with the Nobel prize for Physics in 1932.
In 1924, Heisenberg became the Assistent of Max Born in Göttingen and worked in spring (March/April) and fall of 1924 (September 1924 to early April 1925) and again in the fall of 1925 at the Institute of Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, which at this time was an international meeting point of Physicists who were involved with Quantum theory. In July 1924 he got his habilitation in Göttingen. In the following years, he with Max Born and Pascual Jordan founded theoretical Quantum mechanics.
Only 25 years old, Heisenberg became Professor at the University of Leipzig in 1927, which he and Friedrich Hund turned into a center of theoretical Physics, especially for nuclear physics.
After the Nazis took over Germany in 1933, many famous Physicists like Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger went into Emigration. Heisenberg, however, stayed in Germany. After 1933, he too had to defend against Attacks of the national-socialist oriented, so-called „Deutsche Physik“, which wanted to keep physics "free" of allegedly „Jewish“ Quantum physics and Einstein's theory of Relativity. Adherents of Deutsche Physik, most of all Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard, wanted to cancel his Theories because he was a „theoretical Formalist“ and having „Einstein's spirit“. Stark published an Article about „White Jews in Science“ in the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps in 1937, in which he attacked Heisenberg most of all.
At the Beginning of World War II, he and other Physicists (e.g. Otto Hahn and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker) were summoned to the Heereswaffenamt. Their task - as a part of the Uranprojekt - was supposed to be finding applications of nuclear fission.
