The world out there is really ugly, but the work is beautiful. But retreat into science without politics was impossible for the renowned physicist. When Sommerfeld reached retirement age in , Heisenberg was the obvious candidate to succeed him at Munich. Heisenberg was driven to despair in the course of this struggle. He even thought of emigrating when the investigation into his case seemed to last forever. With the outbreak of the Second World War, the Nazi regime valued the possible uses of physics higher than ideology.
Heisenberg gained government acceptance after the outbreak of the Second World War, and was entrusted by the Ministry of Education with the scientific directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin, together with Otto Hahn.
The institute was under the authority of the Army Ordnance Office because of its central role in co-ordinating a secret war project. His compromises with the Nazi regime — perhaps psychologically explicable in view of his struggle to clear his name — raised doubts about his character. But the historian Paul Rose has taken the opposite view. He believes Heisenberg tried hard to build an atomic bomb, but failed because he did not understand the physics properly.
In his study, Nazi Science , Walker provides an answer, which is perhaps as close as one can approach the truth in this entangled matter. On one hand, he argues the Germans did not invest billions of dollars in the construction of huge factories and the development of detonation devices.
But they did manufacture substances that were known to be potential nuclear explosives as quickly as possible without hindering the war effort.
There is no simple answer, he concludes. It began in when the American physicist Samuel Goudsmit published Alsos , a grim account of the German nuclear war effort. Close search menu Submit search Type to search. Topics Astronomy and space Atomic and molecular Biophysics and bioengineering Condensed matter Culture, history and society Environment and energy Instrumentation and measurement Materials Mathematics and computation Medical physics Optics and photonics Particle and nuclear Quantum.
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Enter e-mail address This e-mail address will be used to create your account. Reset your password. Please enter the e-mail address you used to register to reset your password Enter e-mail address. Registration complete. History Feature Werner Heisenberg: controversial scientist 30 Nov Heisenberg and a number of other prominent German physicists were interned at Farm Hall in England immediately following the war. Heisenberg is best known for his uncertainty principle and theory of quantum mechanics, which he published at the age of twenty-three in He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in for his subsequent research and application of this principle.
For more information on Heisenberg's scientific achievements, visit the Nobel Prize website. Browse our collection of oral histories with workers, families, service members, and more about their experiences in the Manhattan Project. Whether the lack of progress was due to the banishment of the best physicists to England and America because they were nearly all Jewish, or to a reluctance of the remaining ones to provide the Nazis with such a weapon, remains a matter of dispute.
Although he campaigned strongly against the Adenauer government's failure to back the construction of nuclear reactors, Heisenberg also made his own position clear on nuclear weapons, declaring in that he would take no part in their testing or their production. Subjects: Science and technology. View all reference entries ». View all related items in Oxford Reference ». Search for: 'Werner Heisenberg' in Oxford Reference ». All Rights Reserved.
Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice. During Heisenberg was occupied with preparations for the removal of the Max Planck Institute for Physics to Munich. Still Director of this Institute, he went with it to Munich and in he was appointed Professor of Physics in the University of Munich.
For this theory and the applications of it which resulted especially in the discovery of allotropic forms of hydrogen, Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for His new theory was based only on what can be observed, that is to say, on the radiation emitted by the atom.
We cannot, he said, always assign to an electron a position in space at a given time, nor follow it in its orbit, so that we cannot assume that the planetary orbits postulated by Niels Bohr actually exist. Mechanical quantities, such as position, velocity, etc. Later Heisenberg stated his famous principle of uncertainty , which lays it down that the determination of the position and momentum of a mobile particle necessarily contains errors the product of which cannot be less than the quantum constant h and that, although these errors are negligible on the human scale, they cannot be ignored in studies of the atom.
From onwards Heisenberg was interested in work on problems of plasma physics and thermonuclear processes, and also much work in close collaboration with the International Institute of Atomic Physics at Geneva.
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