Background

Werner Heisenberg was born on 5th December, 1901, at Würzburg, Germany. Werner had an older brother named Erwin.  As a young boy he began playing the piano early and was playing compositions by the age of thirteen.  Werner went to the Maximilian school at Munich until he was 19. He the went to the University of Munich to study physics.  His father was the one who hat led him to pursue science.  He loved to hike, and was eager to learn classical literature and philosophy.  Because he was a scientist he was considered suspect by the Nazi government.  Werner worked on developing an atomic bomb for Germany, and was arrested and placed in imprisonment in England from April 1945 until 1946.  Heisenburg wrote and  published “Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science” as well as many others.  Heisenberg retired in 1970 and soon after his health began to fail in 1973, and shortly after he became ill,dying on February 1, 1976, in Munich, Germany.


What did he discover?

Werner Heisenberg is best known for the quantum mechanics and discovered (1925) a way to form them in terms of matrices.  This is a matrix method of calculating the behavior of electrons and other subatomic particles.  He realized visual models had limitations and decided to work strictly with experimental data and mathematical results. Heisenberg also won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the uncertainty principle, which states that it is impossible to specify the exact position and momentum of a particle at the same time.  This was published in "The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory", by Heisenberg himself. 

Equipment?

Heisenberg used a mathematical system to atomic physics, which is called matrix mechanics to discover quantum mechanics and a way to form them in terms of matrices.   


 
History

Because Heisenberg  lived around the same time as Schrodinger and Chadwick the history was pretty much the same.  World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War all took place.