A Playful Genius

Werner Heisenberg revolutionised physics

Early on Werner Heisenberg displayed two qualities that would define his bright career: talent and ambition. His secondary-school teachers already noticed the “playful ease” with which he made his “outstanding achievements”. He was also “quite confident” and eager to impress. Later on, as a professor, Heisenberg played table tennis and wanted to be the best there as well – just like in science and in chess.

Nobel Prize in record time
Born in Würzburg in 1901 to an equally ambitious father – the son of a craftsman who managed to become a professor of Greek – Heisenberg discovered during his Munich schooldays the joy of “playing around between mathematics and direct experience”. He taught himself mathematics as a way to describe the laws of physics. From 1920 on he studied physics in record time. Only one year after he submitted his doctoral thesis “On the Stability and Turbulence of Fluid Flow”, he habilitated in Göttingen with Max Born, whose assistant he had become. In 1927, at the age of 26, Heisenberg was called to Leipzig as Professor of Theoretical Physics.

Thanks to this young researcher, the Saxonian university became connected to the centres of modern nuclear physics: Copenhagen, Cambridge and Göttingen. An inspiring teacher, he also attracted highly gifted students, among them Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker and the future “father of the hydrogen bomb”, Edward Teller. Together with them Heisenberg laid the foundations for solid-state quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1932. Along with Niels Bohr, Max Born und Pascual Jordan, he developed the uncertainty principle, which defies the laws of classical physics.

At the beginning of the Nazi regime the renowned physicist spoke out against the expulsion of Jewish scientists – with little success. He was attacked when he refused to sign a declaration of loyalty to Hitler. In 1937 proponents of “Aryan physics” turned against him and his quantum physics, which they deemed infiltrated by Jews. Heisenberg remained in Germany, despite generous offers from American universities.

During World War II he led the uranium project of Germany’s Army Ordnance Office. Its purpose was to investigate possible applications of nuclear fission. In 1942 he became the director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin-Dahlem, which was supposed to continue the large-scale experiments. Shortly before the end of the war, the Allied forces arrested Heisenberg and other nuclear researchers and took them to the United Kingdom. Because of his career during the Third Reich, Heisenberg was not uncontroversial after the war.

Committed to promoting young researchers
His student Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker said later about Heisenberg: “He was a brilliant scientist, then an artist, and, owing to a sense of obligation, a homo politicus.” Especially in post-war Germany, Heisenberg’s activities were focused on research policy. Under the umbrella of the Max Planck Society he founded an Institute of Physics in Göttingen and served as its director from 1946 to 1958. After that he headed the Max Planck Institute of Physics in Munich until 1970. At the head of the Deutsche Forschungsrat, a predecessor to the DFG, Heisenberg helped shape basic research from 1949 to 1951. As the first president of the re-established Alexander von Humboldt Foundation between 1953 and 1975 he was especially committed to promoting young researchers.

Heisenberg married Elisabeth Schumacher in 1937 and had seven children. He died in Munich in 1976.