Werner Heisenberg Trivia
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59 free Werner Heisenberg trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Werner Heisenberg trivia quiz covers the physicist who created quantum mechanics at 23 and spent the war at the centre of Germany's nuclear programme. The easy questions handle the uncertainty principle, the Nobel Prize, the island where matrix mechanics was born and the TV chemistry teacher who borrowed his name. From there it moves through the life: the professor of Greek who was his father, the Freikorps summer, the doctorate on turbulence, the Scout trip to Finland, the piano, and the economist brother-in-law. The harder end covers the cocaine-and-aspirin hay fever cure, the letter that first described uncertainty, the 'White Jew' affair and Himmler's intervention, the meeting with Speer, the Black Forest reactor, Moe Berg's pistol, the Farm Hall recordings, the CERN job he turned down and the philosophy he found in Plato and the Tao. Every answer was checked against Heisenberg's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our physics and famous physicists quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Heisenberg's 1932 Nobel was announced with the 1933 prize of Dirac and whom?
Erwin Schrödinger
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.
Q 02Heisenberg's Nobel citation was 'for the creation of' what?
Quantum mechanics
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.
Q 03In which city was Heisenberg born, six years after Röntgen discovered X-rays there?
Wurzburg
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.
Q 04Heisenberg's father, once a schoolteacher of classical languages, became a university professor of what?
Medieval and modern Greek
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.
Q 05Heisenberg said physics had 'definitely decided in favor of' which ancient thinker, since matter's smallest units are forms?
Plato
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.
Q 06In 1919 the 17-year-old Heisenberg served with troops in his home city who were suppressing what?
The Bavarian Soviet Republic
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.'
Q 07Under which professor did Heisenberg take his doctorate in 1923?
Arnold Sommerfeld
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.
Q 08Heisenberg's doctoral thesis was on which decidedly non-quantum topic?
Turbulence
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.
Q 09Heisenberg nearly failed his 1923 doctoral oral after being unable to tell an examiner how which device works?
A storage battery
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.
Q 10Heisenberg illustrated his uncertainty principle with an imaginary microscope that lights up an electron using what?
Gamma rays
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.
Q 11Which instrument did Heisenberg, an accomplished musician, play for friends throughout his life?
Piano
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.
Q 12Heisenberg's brother-in-law, the economist E. F. Schumacher, wrote which famous book?
Small Is Beautiful
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.
Q 13When Heisenberg's twins were born in 1938, a physicist friend congratulated him on his what?
'Pair creation'
Q 21In his first years as a professor, Heisenberg used the exclusion principle to explain which long-standing puzzle?
Ferromagnetism
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.
Q 22Heisenberg turned to theoretical physics only after a discouraging university interview about studying which subject?
Pure mathematics
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.
Q 23In the 1930s Heisenberg wrote two papers on Dirac's theory of which particle, first seen by Carl Anderson in 1932?
'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.
Q 14Martin, one of Heisenberg's seven children, studied the brain of which animal?
Fruit fly
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.
Q 15On which pollen-free island did Heisenberg work out his new mechanics in 1925?
Helgoland
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.
Q 16Laid low by hay fever, Heisenberg wrote to his mother that he was scraping by on aspirin and what?
Cocaine
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.
Q 17With Max Born and which other physicist did Heisenberg develop matrix mechanics in 1925?
Pascual Jordan
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'.
Q 18With Bohr away skiing, Heisenberg first described his uncertainty principle in a February 1927 letter to whom?
Wolfgang Pauli
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.
Q 19Throughout the main text of his 1927 uncertainty paper, Heisenberg used the German word 'Ungenauigkeit', meaning what?
Imprecision
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.
Q 20At 25, Heisenberg became Germany's youngest full professor at which university?
Leipzig
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.
The positron
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.
Q 24Heisenberg's 1932 proton-neutron model of the nucleus followed whose discovery that year?
James Chadwick
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.
Q 25With which label did the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps attack Heisenberg?
'White Jew'
'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'.
Q 26Which Nazi leader ended the attacks on Heisenberg in 1938 with letters to Heydrich and Heisenberg?
Heinrich Himmler
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.
Q 27As Germany collapsed in April 1945, how did Heisenberg travel across the south of the country to rejoin his family?
By bicycle
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.
Q 28What was Germany's wartime nuclear research programme, in which Heisenberg was a leading figure, informally called?
Uranverein
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.
Q 29Heisenberg's reactor work moved to Hechingen and Haigerloch, on the edge of which upland region?
The Black Forest
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.
Q 30Which OSS agent and ex-catcher sat in Heisenberg's 1944 Swiss lecture with a pistol?
Moe Berg
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.