Professor Werner Heisenberg, c mid-20th century

Werner Karl Heisenberg, born in Bavaria on 5 December 1901, died 1 February 1976. Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist, known for being one of the main fathers of quantum mechanics, and the principal scientist of the German nuclear program during WWII. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932 for the creation of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg worked with Max Born, creator of these slides, in relation to quantum mechanics. From 1920 to 1933, he studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and further at Göttingen, and received his PhD in 1923. He then completed his Habilitation at Göttingen in 1924. He worked at Göttingen, researched with Niels Bohr, becoming his assistant in 1926 in Copenhagen. He moved to Leipzig in 1927, and at 25 years old was the youngest professor in Germany. During WWII, he worked on the Nazi nuclear program, after originally being accused of behaving like 'a white Jew' by the Nazi newspaper Das Schwarze Korps, edited by Heinrich Himmler. In 1945, as part of the Alsos Mission, the Allied Forces concerned with Germany's progress with developing an atom bomb, smuggled Heisenberg out of Germany across France and Belgium to England. After WWII, he was appointed director of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, and remained there until he moved to Munich in 1958. Concerned with the promotion of international scientific cooperation, Heisenberg signed the convention which established CERN. After this he became the director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and Astrophysics from 1960 to 1970. Heisenberg also spoke against the nuclear armament of West Germany. Heisenberg died of kidney cancer in 1976, aged 74.