A Blog dedicated to History

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Werner Heisenberg


Werner Karl Heisenberg (December 5, 1901 – February 1, 1976) was a celebrated German physicist and Nobel laureate, one of the founders of quantum mechanics and acknowledged to be one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century. Heisenberg was the head of the German nuclear energy project under the Nazi regime, though the nature of this project, and his work in this capacity, has been heavily debated. He is most well-known for discovering one of the central principles of modern physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and for the development of quantum mechanics, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932.

In addition to the development of quantum mechanics, Heisenberg made many other notable contributions to physics. He discovered isospin, co-discovered and heavily developed the Kolmogorov theory of turbulent scaling, and introduced S-matrix theory.

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