Transcript Werner Heisenberg

Werner Heisenberg
BIOGRAPHY
• Werner Heisenberg was born on 5th
December, 1901, at Würzburg.
• He went to the Maximilian school at
Munich until 1920, then he went to the
University of Munich to study physics.
• From 1924 until 1925 he worked with Niels
Bohr, at the University of Copenhagen.
• In 1926 he was appointed Lecturer in
Theoretical Physics at the University of
Copenhagen under Niels Bohr.
• In 1927, when he was only 26, he was
appointed Professor
of
Theoretical
Physics at the University of Leipzig.
• It was in Copenhagen, in 1927, that
Heisenberg developed his uncertainty
principle.
• Heisenberg's name will always be
associated with his theory of quantum
mechanics, published in 1925, when he
was only 23 years old.
• For this theory and the applications of it
which resulted especially in the discovery
of
allotropic
forms
of
hydrogen,
Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Physics for 1932.
• His new theory was based only on what
can be observed, that is to say, on the
radiation emitted by the atom.
• We cannot, he said, always assign to an
electron a position in space at a given time,
nor follow it in its orbit, so that we cannot
assume that the planetary orbits
postulated by Niels Bohr actually exist.
• Mechanical quantities, such as position,
velocity, etc. should be represented, not by
ordinary numbers, but by abstract
mathematical structures called "matrices"
and he formulated his new theory in terms
of matrix equations.
 At the end of the Second World War he,
and other German physicists, were taken
prisoner by American troops and sent to
England.
 But in 1946 he returned to Germany and
reorganized, with his colleagues, the
Institute for Physics at Göttingen.
This Institute was, in 1948, renamed the
Max Planck Institute for Physics.
He gave a lecture in 1956 in Istanbul.
In 1941, he tried to convince Bohr to
develop and construct a nuclear bomb to
support Germany, but because of moral
reasons Bohr did not except.
Uncertainty Principle
• states that certain pairs of physical
properties, like position and momentum,
cannot both be known to arbitrary
precision.
• That is, the more precisely one property is
known, the less precisely the other can be
known.
• According to Heisenberg its meaning is
that it is impossible to determine
simultaneously both the position and
velocity of an electron or any other particle
with any degree of accuracy or certainty.
References
http://nobelprize.org
http://en.wikipedia.org
http://www.canlibilimi.com