59 Fun Facts About Werner Heisenberg

Heisenberg's 1932 Nobel was announced with the 1933 prize of Dirac and whom?

Erwin Schrödinger and Dirac shared the 1933 prize. The committee had judged no 1932 nominee worthy, held that year's prize over, and then gave it to Heisenberg alone twelve months late.

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

Quantum mechanics earned the citation partly through a bold prediction: applied to molecules made of two like atoms, it said hydrogen must come in two distinct forms, and experiments later found them.

In which city was Heisenberg born, six years after Röntgen discovered X-rays there?

Wurzburg was his home only until he was eight: he started primary school there, then his father won a university chair elsewhere and the family moved away in 1910.

Heisenberg's father, once a schoolteacher of classical languages, became a university professor of what?

Medieval and modern Greek seems to have rubbed off on the son: he is said to have objected that the Greek 'mesos' has no 'tr' in it when a new particle was named the 'mesotron', later the meson.

Heisenberg said physics had 'definitely decided in favor of' which ancient thinker, since matter's smallest units are forms?

Plato built matter from geometric shapes in his Timaeus. Heisenberg sided with him against the eternal atoms of Democritus, because subatomic matter can be created, destroyed and turned from one kind into another.

In 1919 the 17-year-old Heisenberg served with troops in his home city who were suppressing what?

The Bavarian Soviet Republic was crushed in bloody street fighting that May, yet Heisenberg later shrugged off his part: 'I was a boy of 17 and I considered it a kind of adventure. It was like playing cops and robbers.'

Under which professor did Heisenberg take his doctorate in 1923?

Arnold Sommerfeld was nominated for the Nobel Prize 84 times, more than any other physicist, and never won it, while several of his own doctoral students, Heisenberg among them, did.

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

Turbulence proved so hard a problem that he offered only an approximate answer; a mathematician soon disputed it, and the result stayed in doubt for more than twenty years before it was confirmed.

Heisenberg nearly failed his 1923 doctoral oral after being unable to tell an examiner how which device works?

A storage battery stumped him after he had already fumbled the resolving power of a microscope. The examiner saw no reason to pass him; he scraped a III, roughly a C, and left town on the midnight train.

Heisenberg illustrated his uncertainty principle with an imaginary microscope that lights up an electron using what?

Gamma rays gave his imaginary microscope its very high resolution. Bohr found flaws in the argument, and Heisenberg added a note to his paper conceding the error, though the result itself stood.

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

Piano playing found him a wife: performing at a private recital in January 1937, he met Elisabeth, then 22, and the two were married that April.

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

Small Is Beautiful was written by a man who had spent twenty years, from 1950 to 1970, as chief economic adviser to Britain's nationalised coal industry before he made his case for thinking small.

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

'Pair creation' is the physicists' term for a particle and its antiparticle springing into being together out of pure energy, which made it a neat joke for fraternal twins, a boy and a girl.

Martin, one of Heisenberg's seven children, studied the brain of which animal?

The fruit fly kept Martin Heisenberg busy for more than three decades as a genetics professor, breeding mutant flies to trace where their tiny brains lay down memories.

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

Helgoland gave him the breakthrough in a single night: too excited to sleep once the calculation came out, he left the house, climbed a rock and waited there for the sunrise.

Laid low by hay fever, Heisenberg wrote to his mother that he was scraping by on aspirin and what?

Cocaine and the like were barely getting him through, he wrote, cursing the fine weather and longing for home, where it sometimes rained for ten days on end.

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

Pascual Jordan and Born turned his odd arrays of numbers into matrix mathematics while he was away lecturing and camping; when he came back, the three wrote up the theory in the famous 'three-man paper'.

With Bohr away skiing, Heisenberg first described his uncertainty principle in a February 1927 letter to whom?

Wolfgang Pauli received fourteen pages on it. Bohr came back from Norway to find a paper already drafted, objected that its reasoning was too narrow, and the two men quarrelled over it for weeks.

Throughout the main text of his 1927 uncertainty paper, Heisenberg used the German word 'Ungenauigkeit', meaning what?

Imprecision was his word nearly to the end: 'Unsicherheit', uncertainty, the term English adopted, turns up almost only in an endnote, while German physics now speaks of 'Unschärfe', blurriness.

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

Leipzig is where he supervised Edward Teller's doctorate; a decade later the pupil was in America working on the Allied atomic bomb while his old professor was a leading figure in Germany's fission research.

In his first years as a professor, Heisenberg used the exclusion principle to explain which long-standing puzzle?

Ferromagnetism, he showed, comes from a purely quantum 'exchange' effect with no classical counterpart: it makes the spins of neighbouring electrons line up, which is why a piece of iron can stay magnetised.

Heisenberg turned to theoretical physics only after a discouraging university interview about studying which subject?

Pure mathematics was his plan, with number theory as his research topic, until an interview with a professor close to retirement went badly; the theoretical physics professor then took him on at once.

In the 1930s Heisenberg wrote two papers on Dirac's theory of which particle, first seen by Carl Anderson in 1932?

The positron fooled even Dirac, who at first hoped the positive particle in his equation might be the proton; Anderson's cloud-chamber photograph of a cosmic ray showed that it was something new.

Heisenberg's 1932 proton-neutron model of the nucleus followed whose discovery that year?

James Chadwick found the neutron early in 1932; within months Heisenberg had worked out how it and the proton hold together, an early account of what later became known as the strong force.

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

'White Jew' was the SS paper's name for an 'Aryan' who thought like one: its July 1937 article damned him as a champion of 'Jewish physics' and said that such men should be made to 'disappear'.

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

Heinrich Himmler was reached through the two men's mothers, who knew each other: Heisenberg's mother paid a call on Himmler's, and after a frightening year-long SS investigation her son was cleared.

As Germany collapsed in April 1945, how did Heisenberg travel across the south of the country to rejoin his family?

By bicycle: once his staff were accounted for he set off in the dark and took three days to cross a beaten, bombed-out Germany to the mountain house where his family was sheltering.

What was Germany's wartime nuclear research programme, in which Heisenberg was a leading figure, informally called?

Uranverein, the 'Uranium Club', never came near a weapon: in 1942 the army gave up control of the work, and the military put its money into rockets and jet aircraft instead.

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

The Black Forest fringe hid his last reactor in a beer cellar cut beneath a castle church at Haigerloch, where an American mission found it in April 1945 and at once began taking it apart.

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

Moe Berg, a former major-league catcher turned spy, had orders to shoot if the talk suggested that Germany was close to a bomb; he judged that it was not, and Heisenberg finished his lecture unharmed.

Which co-discoverer of electron spin, Heisenberg's host in America in 1939, became scientific head of the Alsos Mission?

Samuel Goudsmit had put him up in Ann Arbor in the summer of 1939, when American colleagues urged him to stay; they next met in May 1945, with Heisenberg a prisoner and Goudsmit there to question him.

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

Farm Hall was wired with hidden microphones. When a fellow detainee wondered aloud about bugs, Heisenberg laughed that the British were 'not as cute as all that' and did not 'know the real Gestapo methods'.

Who learned of his Nobel Prize while interned with Heisenberg in 1945?

Otto Hahn was awarded the 1944 chemistry prize for discovering nuclear fission but, still a prisoner, could not go to receive it; hidden microphones caught the detainees' talk, in transcripts declassified only in 1992.

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

The critical mass he first guessed at ran to tons of uranium-235, far too much. 'Quite honestly I have never worked it out,' he told a colleague, and a week later he gave the detainees a largely correct lecture on the bomb.

At which 1927 conference did Heisenberg and Max Born declare the new quantum theory complete, to Einstein's dismay?

The Solvay Conference in Brussels heard the two men call their theory closed to further modification. Einstein never accepted it and spent years devising thought experiments meant to show it was incomplete.

Heisenberg led West Germany's delegation in founding which laboratory, whose convention was signed in 1953?

CERN gave German physicists a way back into big nuclear science at a time when the occupying powers still banned fission research at home; he went on to chair its Scientific Policy Committee for years.

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

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation was refounded in 1953 to bring foreign scholars to German institutes; Chancellor Adenauer chose him to lead it as part of mending the country's scientific ties abroad.

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

West German nuclear weapons were in prospect because Chancellor Adenauer had welcomed NATO plans for tactical warheads; eighteen leading scientists answered that none of them would help to make, test or deploy such arms.

Heisenberg's Gifford Lectures at St Andrews in the mid-1950s were published under what title?

Physics and Philosophy grew out of a lecture series endowed in a Scottish judge's will to promote 'natural theology in the widest sense', which is why a physicist spent a winter talking about reality instead of equations.

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

Physics and Beyond gave up the German title's meaning, 'The Part and the Whole'. Inside, he retold his life as a chain of conversations with fellow physicists, reconstructed from memory some forty years later.

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle says a particle's position cannot be known exactly together with its what?

Momentum: the more sharply one of the pair is fixed, the hazier the other becomes. The trade-off is far too slight to notice in everyday objects and matters only on the scale of atoms.

Which book's author says he showed Heisenberg its manuscript chapter by chapter?

The Tao of Physics drew a story from him, its author Fritjof Capra recalled: long talks with the poet Rabindranath Tagore in India had shown Heisenberg that the new physics was 'not all that crazy' to a whole culture.

Which of Heisenberg's doctoral students won the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics for nuclear magnetic resonance?

Felix Bloch took his doctorate under Heisenberg but left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power; he did his prizewinning work at Stanford, in California.

Which American family's philanthropy paid for Heisenberg's year of research with Niels Bohr in 1924-25?

Rockefeller money, through an international fellowship, sent him to Bohr's institute soon after hyperinflation had left the German mark all but worthless, when American grants were keeping many young German scientists in physics.

Which game filled the 16-year-old Heisenberg's spare hours during wartime farm work in 1918?

Chess. He played it to a high standard, and at university it so absorbed him that his professor finally told him to stop wasting his time on it.

Which television antihero adopted 'Heisenberg' as his alias?

Walter White first gives the name when he confronts a violent dealer who has robbed and beaten his partner: a chemistry teacher borrowing a physicist's name as he starts turning into a drug kingpin.

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

Copenhagen puts on stage his September 1941 visit to Niels Bohr in the occupied city. Bohr was alarmed by what he heard, and the two men could never afterwards agree on what Heisenberg had meant to say.

Which German actor played Heisenberg in Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer?

Matthias Schweighofer was cast by Nolan soon after his international breakout as the zombie-heist safecracker, a character whose prequel, Army of Thieves, he went on to direct as well as star in.

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

Compensator was the writers' nod to the uncertainty principle, which ought to make a transporter impossible. Asked how the device works, technical adviser Michael Okuda replied: 'It works very well, thank you.'

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

Wave function collapse first appears in his 1927 uncertainty paper, where a measurement 'reduces' a spread of possibilities to a single result; five years later John von Neumann wrote it into the theory's mathematics.

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 was on which phenomenon?

The anomalous Zeeman effect, a splitting of spectral lines in a magnetic field that the old quantum theory could not explain, was a leading puzzle of the day; it got its name because electron spin, the cause, was still undiscovered.

Which elder of German physics, Heisenberg recalled, urged him in 1933 to 'think of the time after the catastrophe'?

Max Planck, then 75, advised those who stayed to band together and form 'islands of constancy', by Heisenberg's later account; he took the advice, and his choice to remain has been debated ever since.

Heisenberg's high school was run, during his first years there, by which of his relatives?

His grandfather Nikolaus Wecklein, his mother's father, was the school's headmaster; Heisenberg's parents had met because his father once worked there as a trainee teacher under him.

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

Nuclear fusion. Having led Germany's wartime research into splitting the atom, he turned in his last working years to the opposite reaction, the fusing of light nuclei inside a hot plasma.

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

The Oder-Neisse line. The eight Protestant signatories urged Bonn to accept the loss of Germany's old eastern lands to Poland, a step Willy Brandt's government finally took in the 1970 Treaty of Warsaw.

In programming slang, what is a 'heisenbug', named in a nod to Heisenberg?

A bug that vanishes when studied. The joke borrows the popular reading of his principle, that observing a thing disturbs it; switching on a debugger really can change a program enough to hide the fault.

Under which English title did Elisabeth Heisenberg's memoir of life with her husband appear in 1984?

Inner Exile. Her German title meant 'the political life of an apolitical person'; the English edition instead borrowed the term for Germans who stayed under Hitler but withdrew inwardly from the regime.

Which scarce substance, made at a Norwegian plant that Allied saboteurs attacked, did Germany's wartime reactor project under Heisenberg rely on?

Heavy water. Because the German reactor project relied on it, Norwegian commandos and Allied bombers kept wrecking the Vemork plant that made it, and by the war's end Heisenberg's team had still not achieved a chain reaction.