Heisenberg Born: Architect of Quantum Uncertainty
Werner Heisenberg was born in December 1901 in Würzburg. He formulated his uncertainty principle in 1927 at twenty-five: the more precisely you measure a particle's position, the less precisely you can know its momentum, and vice versa. This wasn't a limitation of instruments. It was a feature of the universe. He won the Nobel Prize in 1932. During World War II he led Germany's nuclear weapons program. Whether he deliberately slowed it down or simply couldn't get it to work is one of the great unresolved questions in the history of science. He died in 1976. The uncertainty about his wartime choices was appropriate.
December 5, 1901
125 years ago
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