Werner Heisenberg Timeline

Werner Heisenberg 55

1919 Heisenberg joins the Freikorps in Munich Aged 17, against the Bavarian Soviet Republic He remembered it as playing cops and robbers - seizing bicycles and typewriters from red offices.
1922 Heisenberg meets Niels Bohr At the Bohr Festival in Göttingen Sommerfeld took his student along. The meeting shaped the next forty years of his work.
1923 Doctorate under Arnold Sommerfeld On the stability and turbulence of fluid flows His thesis was about turbulence, not the atom - a subject he returned to after the war.
1924 Habilitation at Göttingen under Max Born On the anomalous Zeeman effect Qualified to teach at 22, and already working on the problem the old quantum theory could not solve.
1924 – 1925 Heisenberg goes to Copenhagen on a Rockefeller fellowship Seven months with Bohr, to 1 May 1925 The institute where the interpretation of quantum mechanics would be argued out.
1925 Hay fever sends Heisenberg to Helgoland A pollen-free island in the North Sea Aspirin and cocaine had not helped. He took his physics to a rock with almost no vegetation.
1925 The Umdeutung paper Describing only what can be observed Heisenberg threw out electron orbits and kept the light atoms emit. It became matrix mechanics.
1925 The three-man paper Born, Heisenberg and Jordan complete matrix mechanics Born recognised Heisenberg's strange multiplication as matrix algebra, which Heisenberg did not know.
1926 Heisenberg becomes Bohr's assistant in Copenhagen Lecturer at the university The year of arguing with Bohr and Schrödinger about what the mathematics meant.
1927 Heisenberg takes the chair at Leipzig The youngest full professor in Germany, at 25 Teller, Oppenheimer, Bloch, Peierls, Rabi, Teller and Weizsäcker passed through his institute.
1927 The uncertainty paper is published On the perceptual content of quantum kinematics and mechanics Position and momentum cannot both be pinned down. The limit is in nature, not in the instruments.
1927 The uncertainty principle, in a letter to Pauli Fourteen pages, written before the paper He called it Ungenauigkeit - imprecision - not uncertainty.
1928 Heisenberg explains ferromagnetism Using the Pauli exclusion principle The exchange interaction - why iron is magnetic - came out of his first Leipzig paper.
1929 A lecture tour of China, Japan, India and the United States Arriving in Tokyo with Paul Dirac Quantum mechanics carried around the world by two men in their twenties.
1929 Heisenberg and Pauli found quantum field theory Two papers on the quantum dynamics of wave fields The framework behind every modern theory of particles.
1932 The proton-neutron model of the nucleus Three papers, months after Chadwick found the neutron Heisenberg worked out how a nucleus could be built from protons and neutrons, and introduced isospin.
1933 Deutsche Physik attacks theoretical physics Lenard and Stark against Jewish physics Two Nobel laureates led a campaign against relativity and quantum mechanics on racial grounds.
1933 The Nobel Prize for 1932 For the creation of quantum mechanics The award had been held over a year. Einstein had nominated him, Born and Jordan in 1928.
1936 A theory of cosmic-ray showers Six papers over three years A lifelong side-interest that became one of the founding subjects of particle physics.
1936 The Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangian Light bending light in the vacuum With his student Hans Euler, a first calculation of what the quantum vacuum does to strong fields.
1937 Heisenberg marries Elisabeth Schumacher They met in January at a private music recital He was an accomplished pianist. They had seven children, the first two twins.
1937 Das Schwarze Korps calls Heisenberg a White Jew The SS newspaper says he should be made to disappear The attack was meant seriously, and it cost him Sommerfeld's chair in Munich.
1938 Himmler settles the Heisenberg affair Two letters, one to Heydrich and one to Heisenberg Their mothers knew each other from a Bavarian hiking club. Germany, Himmler wrote, could not afford to lose him.
1939 Heisenberg refuses to emigrate Visiting Goudsmit at Ann Arbor, weeks before the war He would next see Goudsmit in 1945, as the scientific head of the mission that captured him.
1939 The Uranverein is formed The German nuclear project, on the day the war began Army Ordnance took over the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics. Heisenberg joined at the second meeting.
1939 Report on the possibility of technical energy from uranium fission Heisenberg's first paper for the Uranverein Classified top secret. The authors were not allowed to keep copies.
1941 The Copenhagen meeting with Bohr What was said has been argued over ever since The friendship did not survive it. Michael Frayn built a play out of the three possible versions.
1942 Heisenberg lectures Reich officials on fission Adapted, he later wrote, to the intelligence level of a Reich Minister He set out the energy in a split nucleus and the need for pure uranium-235.
1942 Heisenberg is made director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics The army hands the institute back to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society The project turned from weapons toward a reactor, and kept its war-important status.
1942 Heisenberg tells Speer there will be no bomb before 1945 At the meeting that decided the German programme Whether this was honest judgement or quiet sabotage is the central question of his life.
1942 The S-matrix Three papers on the observable quantities in particle theory The same instinct as 1925: describe what goes in and what comes out, and nothing in between.
1943 Chair of theoretical physics in Berlin At the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität He moved his family to Urfeld as the bombing of Berlin increased.
1944 Moe Berg attends a lecture in Zurich with a pistol Under orders to shoot if Germany sounded close to a bomb The former baseball catcher, sent by the OSS, decided it was not necessary.
1945 The institute moves to the Black Forest Hechingen and Haigerloch, away from the bombing The experimental reactor was rebuilt in a cave under a church at Haigerloch.
1945 Alsos captures Heisenberg at Urfeld An alpine operation in territory still held by German troops He met Goudsmit again in Heidelberg on 5 May. Germany surrendered two days later.
1945 Operation Epsilon: ten German scientists are flown to Farm Hall A former MI6 safe house at Godmanchester Every room was bugged. The transcripts stayed secret for 47 years.
1945 Hiroshima reaches Farm Hall The detainees hear it on the BBC At first they did not believe it. Heisenberg admitted he had never calculated a critical mass.
1946 Director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics Successor to the dissolved Kaiser Wilhelm Society Cosmic radiation was the core subject, with a colloquium every Saturday morning.
1946 Heisenberg is released and settles in Göttingen Eight months after his capture He started rebuilding German physics almost immediately.
1946 A Soviet offer arrives by courier Heinz Pose invites him to work in the USSR He politely declined, as he declined Yale five years later.
1947 Papers on superconductivity and turbulence Returning to the subject of his doctorate Post-war Germany had little equipment, so he worked on what needed only paper.
1953 Heisenberg signs the CERN convention On behalf of the Federal Republic of Germany He turned down the job of founding scientific director, but chaired the policy committee that set its programme.
1953 President of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 550 scholars from 78 nations during his tenure He resigned only shortly before his death.
1955 The Gifford Lectures at St Andrews Published in 1958 as Physics and Philosophy The most accessible statement of the Copenhagen interpretation, and his best-known book.
1957 Planning West Germany's first research reactors At Karlsruhe and Garching The atomic egg at Garching went critical in October 1957.
1957 The Göttingen Manifesto Eighteen physicists refuse to work on nuclear weapons Signed against West German nuclear armament. Heisenberg expected politicians to ignore it and the public not to.
1958 The institute moves to Munich Renamed for physics and astrophysics Heisenberg was co-director with Ludwig Biermann, then sole director from 1960.
1958 The world formula A unified field theory announced with Pauli Pauli withdrew, and the press ran it anyway. It came to nothing, and Heisenberg worked on it for years.
1961 The Memorandum of Tübingen Eight scientists on nuclear arms and the Oder-Neisse line Recognising the Polish border was politically explosive in West Germany at the time.
1969 Der Teil und das Ganze His memoir, written as a chain of conversations A popular success and a headache for historians: he admitted abridging events to make them concise.
1970 Heisenberg resigns his directorship After a decade running the Munich institute He kept writing on philosophy and the history of physics.
1973 Scientific and Religious Truth Accepting the Romano Guardini Prize in Munich He called nature God's second book, and refused to treat religion as an outmoded phase.
1976 Werner Heisenberg dies Aged 74, of kidney cancer, at home in Munich The next evening colleagues walked from the institute to his house and left a candle at the door.
1992 The Farm Hall transcripts are released Declassified after 47 years Analysis of the errors in his critical-mass calculation suggested he had genuinely never tried it before.
2008 Walter White takes the name Heisenberg Breaking Bad borrows the most famous name in uncertainty A chemistry teacher's alias made the physicist a household name for a generation that had not heard of him.