Nobel prize winning physicist Werner Heisenberg was born in 1901, the second child of Annie and August Heisenberg. Heisenberg's father, August, was a professor of Greek languages at the University of Munich and a teacher at a secondary school, and as such, encouraged both his sons to excel in their academic and musical studies. Heisenberg completed his early schooling at the Maximillan Gymnasium in Munich, and entered the University of Munich as a physics students in 1920 at the age of 19. After earning his doctorate, he moved to the University of Göttingen, where he served as an assistant to physicist Max Born. In 1924, Heisenberg worked with Niels Bohr at the University of Copenhagen before returning to Göttingen in 1925.
In 1925 in a paper entitled "Uber quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen" ("About the Quantum-Theoretical Reinterpretation of Kinetic and Mechanical Relationships"), Heisenberg redefined Bohr's model of the planetary atom and paved the way for the development of quantum mechanics itself. Heisenberg departed from Bohr's idea of invisible particles moving in unseen predefined paths, instead focusing on a theory that expressed the physical variables in atomic systems as abstract arrays of numbers, or matrices. These matrices, or matrixequations, observed the same rules as matrix algebra. Heisenberg, Born, and colleague Pascual Jordan went on to publish The Physical Principles of Quantum Theory, a paper detailing these new matrix mechanics, in 1928. It was for this groundbreaking work in quantum physics and the later applications of his theory in discovering certain forms of hydrogen that Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1932.
In 1926, Heisenberg returned to the University of Copenhagen to once again study under Neils Bohr. The following year, he was appointed the Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Leipzig. It was here that Heisenberg published "On the perceptual content of quantum theoretical kinematics and mechanics," which outlined his famed uncertainty principle, or indeterminacy principle of matrix mechanics.
Heisenberg moved to Berlin in 1939 shortly after the outbreak of World War II, after being called on by the Army Ordnance Office to develop a nuclear fission program with a number of his physicist colleagues (called "the uranium club"). While working on the nuclear program, Heisenberg was appointed Professor of Physics at the University of Berlin and Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in 1942. Shortly after Germany's surrender in 1945, he was interned at an allied prisoner-of-war camp in Versailles for his role in the German war effort, and then moved to England for security reasons. However, the British viewed Heisenberg and his colleagues, who had never joined the Nazi party, as a crucial part of their long-term plan for an economic and scientific revival of what was eventually to be an autonomous West German state, and in 1946, the scientists were returned to Germany, although they remained English detainees. Heisenberg was reunited with his family later that year and with allied approval, was named as the head of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics in Göttingen. In 1958, both Heisenberg and the Institute relocated to Munich, where he would spend the remainder of his life. He succumbed to kidney and gall bladder cancer in 1976 at the age of 75.
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