Werner Heisenberg

December 5, 1901 - February 1, 1976


Membership Type:
International Member (elected 1961)

Werner Heisenberg was a nuclear physicist who founded the field of quantum mechanics. In 1927 he published his famous uncertainty principle, which states that it is impossible to locate a particle’s momentum and position simultaneously; the more precise the measurement of a particle’s position, the less precise the measurement of its momentum, and vice versa. In his theory of quantum mechanics he offered an explanation for discrete energy states through matrices. He was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics, the application of which has, inter alia, led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen."

Photograph courtesy German Federal Archive, Bundesarchiv, Bild183-R57262 / CC-BY-SA  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.

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