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Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenberg who was a German physicist. He was born on December 5, 1901 and died on February 1, 1976. He was born in Wurzburg, Germany and died in Munich, Germany. He followed his father's footsteps in the science world however his dad was a Greek philosopher, and he was a physicist focusing on quantum mechanics. -
Formulating Quantum Mechanics
Heisenberg was the first person to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices. In 1925 he did his work on spectrum intensities of the electron taken as an anharmonic oscillator. It needed to be based on only observable quantities. -
Uncertainty Principle
One of Heisenberg's most notable formulations was the uncertainty principle, or indeterminacy principle. His paper that came out in March of 1927 "On the Perceptual Content of Quantum Theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics" discusses that momentum and position of a particle could not both be exactly measured at the same time.
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Nobel Prize
His work on quantum mechanics won him a Nobel Prize in 1932. His Nobel Prize was about the work he did on a program to create a quantum field theory which combined quantum mechanics with relativity theory to understand the interaction of particles and force fields.
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World War II
During World War II Heisenberg was recruited to help build an atomic bomb. He worked as a leader at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin. They were unsuccessful in creating a reactor or atomic bomb. Some believe he wasn't smart enough to do it while others believe he purposefully sabotaged it. He had clearly made huge errors in his work.