60 Fun Facts About Werner Heisenberg

For which year was Heisenberg awarded his Nobel Prize, announced belatedly in November 1933?

Einstein had nominated him, together with Born and Jordan, back in 1928.

Heisenberg's Nobel citation was 'for the creation of' what?

It added that its application had led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen.

In which German city was Heisenberg born in 1901?

His son Martin later became a neurobiologist at the university there.

Heisenberg's father held Germany's only full professorship in what subject?

He had begun as a secondary-school teacher of classical languages.

As a teenager Heisenberg read which Plato dialogue while hiking in the Bavarian Alps?

He later said 'modern physics has definitely decided in favour of Plato': the smallest units of matter are forms, not objects.

In 1919 the teenage Heisenberg was in Munich as a Freikorps member fighting what?

Decades later he called it 'playing cops and robbers'; his duties were seizing bicycles and typewriters from 'red' offices.

Under which professor did Heisenberg take his doctorate at Munich in 1923?

Sommerfeld took him to Gottingen in 1922 to hear Bohr lecture, a meeting that changed his life.

Heisenberg's doctoral thesis was on which decidedly non-quantum topic?

He returned briefly to the stability of laminar flow after the Second World War.

Heisenberg first met Niels Bohr at the 1922 'Bohr Festival' lectures held in which town?

The seven lectures coincided with the town's Handel festival, hence the nickname.

As a Scout leader in August 1923, Heisenberg organised a group trip to which country?

He belonged to the Neupfadfinder, part of the German Youth Movement.

Which instrument did Heisenberg, an accomplished musician, play for friends throughout his life?

He met his wife Elisabeth at a private music recital in January 1937.

Heisenberg's brother-in-law, the economist E. F. Schumacher, wrote which famous book?

Elisabeth Schumacher married Heisenberg in April 1937, three months after they met.

When Heisenberg's twins were born in 1938, a physicist friend congratulated him on his what?

The pun on pair production was typical Pauli; five more children followed over the next 12 years.

How many children did Werner and Elisabeth Heisenberg have in all?

Martin became a neurobiologist and Jochen a physics professor in New Hampshire.

On which pollen-free island did Heisenberg work out his new mechanics in 1925?

The result was the Umdeutung ('reinterpretation') paper published that September.

Before retreating to the island, Heisenberg had tried to treat his hay fever with aspirin and what?

Neither worked, which is why he fled to the sea.

With Max Born and which other physicist did Heisenberg develop matrix mechanics in 1925?

Born recognised that Heisenberg's strange arrays were matrices, then a tool of pure mathematics few physicists knew.

Heisenberg first described his uncertainty principle in a February 1927 letter to whom?

He was working in Copenhagen as Bohr's assistant at the time.

The German word Heisenberg actually used in his 1927 paper, 'Ungenauigkeit', means what?

'Uncertainty' was a later translation that stuck.

At 25, Heisenberg became Germany's youngest full professor at which university?

Teller, Oppenheimer, Bloch, Peierls and Weisskopf were among those who came to hear him.

Heisenberg's first paper as a full professor used the Pauli exclusion principle to explain what?

The video game villain Karl Heisenberg in Resident Evil Village owes his magnetic powers to this work.

Which airship arrived in Tokyo in August 1929 along with Heisenberg and Paul Dirac?

It was the last leg of a lecture tour that took him through China, Japan, India and the United States.

In 1933 Heisenberg presented his theory of which particle, predicted by Dirac and found by Carl Anderson in 1932?

He reinterpreted Dirac's equation as a field equation allowing particles to be created and destroyed.

After Chadwick's 1932 discovery, Heisenberg proposed a nucleus built from protons and what?

The three papers on the neutron-proton model appeared just as the Nazis came to power.

With which label did the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps attack Heisenberg?

The Deutsche Physik movement despised relativity and quantum theory as 'Jewish physics'.

Which Nazi leader ended the attacks on Heisenberg in 1938 with letters to Heydrich and Heisenberg?

The two men's mothers knew each other; Heisenberg's mother paid Himmler's mother a visit.

Who got Sommerfeld's Munich chair instead of Heisenberg, in what was seen as a travesty?

He was not a theoretical physicist and had never published in a physics journal.

What was the German nuclear weapons programme, formed on the day the war began, called?

The 'Uranium Club' met for the first time on 16 September 1939 in Berlin.

In June 1942 Heisenberg told Albert Speer a bomb could not be built before which year?

After that the German project focused on nuclear power rather than weapons.

Heisenberg's reactor work moved to Hechingen and Haigerloch, on the edge of which upland region?

The area later fell into the French zone, but the American Alsos team got there first.

Which OSS agent and ex-catcher sat in Heisenberg's 1944 Swiss lecture with a pistol?

The story became the film The Catcher Was a Spy.

Which physicist, visited by Heisenberg in 1939, was chief scientific adviser to the Alsos Mission?

Heisenberg had refused his 1939 invitation to emigrate to the United States.

Where in England were Heisenberg and nine other German scientists secretly held and recorded in 1945?

The Godmanchester house had been an MI6 safe house; the microphones caught their reaction to Hiroshima.

The secret recordings of the interned German scientists were finally released in which year?

They show Heisenberg making serious errors when he first tried to calculate a bomb's critical mass.

On hearing of Hiroshima, Heisenberg admitted he had never before calculated what for a bomb?

A week later he gave a broadly correct lecture on bomb physics, evidence to some that he had simply never tried during the war.

In 1957 Heisenberg helped plan West Germany's first nuclear research reactor at which centre?

A second research reactor went up the same year at the technical university in Garching.

Heisenberg signed the 1953 convention founding which lab, then declined to be its first scientific director?

He chaired its science policy committee instead and shaped its research programme.

From 1953 until shortly before his death Heisenberg was president of which foundation?

In his tenure 550 scholars from 78 nations received its research grants.

The 1957 Gottinger Manifest, which Heisenberg signed, took a public stand against what?

He signed the Memorandum of Tubingen on the same theme in 1961.

Heisenberg's 1955-56 Gifford Lectures at St Andrews were published under what title?

In them he argued that modern physics was part of a historical process 'toward a unification and a widening of our present world'.

Heisenberg's memoir Der Teil und das Ganze appeared in English in 1971 under what title?

Written as reconstructed dialogues, it delighted readers and irritated historians of science.

In his last letter to Einstein, Heisenberg consoled him that 'the good Lord God' would know what?

That way, he wrote, the causality principle could keep its validity.

Heisenberg was in 'complete agreement' with which book on Eastern thought and modern science?

He said conversations with the poet Rabindranath Tagore made ideas 'that seemed so crazy' suddenly make sense.

Heisenberg said he would consider a 1951 Yale job offer only if what happened?

He never left Germany under the Nazis and was equally unwilling to leave after the war.

Heisenberg died in February 1976 of what?

He is buried in Munich's Waldfriedhof.

The evening after Heisenberg died, colleagues walked to his home and left what at his door?

His widow later described him as 'first and foremost, a spontaneous person', and only fourth a homo politicus.

Which television antihero adopted 'Heisenberg' as his alias?

The Breaking Bad chemistry teacher kept the name through his rise to drug kingpin.

Daniel Craig played Heisenberg in the 2002 film adaptation of which Michael Frayn play?

It dramatises his still-mysterious 1941 conversation with Bohr.

Who played Heisenberg in Christopher Nolan's 2023 film Oppenheimer?

The film shows Oppenheimer attending his lectures in Europe in the 1920s.

In Star Trek: The Next Generation, transporters rely on a 'Heisenberg' what?

It hand-waves away the uncertainty principle so that every particle can be tracked.

Which concept did Heisenberg introduce to describe what happens to a quantum state when it is measured?

It sits at the heart of the Copenhagen interpretation he developed with Bohr.

Heisenberg's wartime three-part series covered which observables-only tool of particle theory?

It followed the same 'observables only' philosophy as his 1925 breakthrough.

Heisenberg's 1924 habilitation thesis at Gottingen was on which phenomenon?

He completed it under Max Born, only a year after his doctorate on turbulence under Sommerfeld.

In 1939 Heisenberg bought a family summer home beside which southern German lake?

The retreat at Urfeld am Walchensee became the family's refuge when Allied bombing of Berlin intensified in 1943.

Heisenberg's son Jochen became a physics professor in which US state?

Another son, Martin, became a neurobiologist at the University of Wurzburg, the city where his father was born.

From 1957 onward, Heisenberg took a strong interest in plasma physics and which process?

He also sat on, and for several years chaired, the scientific policy committee of the International Institute of Atomic Physics in Geneva.

Heisenberg signed the Memorandum of Tubingen urging recognition of which border?

The eight signatories wanted it accepted as the official German-Polish border and also opposed nuclear arms for West Germany.

In which city's Waldfriedhof cemetery is Heisenberg buried?

He died at home of kidney cancer in 1976, and his institute had moved to the same city back in 1958.

What was the English title of the 1980 book Heisenberg's widow Elisabeth wrote about him?

She described him as first a spontaneous person, then a brilliant scientist, then a talented artist, and only fourth, from duty, a political man.

In which year was Heisenberg elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society?

He had joined the American Philosophical Society back in 1937 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences followed in 1958.