Hay fever sent Heisenberg to a rocky island where quantum mechanics took shape
In June 1925, Werner Heisenberg was so miserable with hay fever that neither aspirin nor cocaine helped. He fled to Helgoland, a nearly pollen-free island in the North Sea, and worked on atomic theory. The paper he published that September reinterpreted the old quantum rules and launched modern quantum mechanics.
That Umdeutung paper, meaning reinterpretation, still puzzles historians. Heisenberg discarded quantities that could not be observed and multiplied tables of values in an order-dependent way, without knowing that mathematicians already had a theory of matrices. Back in Göttingen, over roughly six months with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, the idea grew into matrix mechanics. Working in Copenhagen with Niels Bohr in 1927, he formulated the uncertainty principle, and in 1932 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for creating quantum mechanics.
Born in Würzburg in 1901, he was the son of a classics teacher who became Germany's only full professor of medieval and modern Greek. As a teenager he read Plato's Timaeus while hiking in the Bavarian Alps, and later claimed modern physics had sided with Plato, since the smallest units of matter behave more like mathematical forms than ordinary objects. He studied under Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich, writing his doctorate on turbulent flow in 1923, and first met Bohr at a 1922 lecture series in Göttingen.
At 25 he became Germany's youngest full professor, taking the theoretical physics chair at Leipzig, where Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer attended his lectures. His first Leipzig paper used Pauli's exclusion principle to explain ferromagnetism, and in 1929 he and Wolfgang Pauli laid foundations for relativistic quantum field theory. He was an accomplished pianist, and he met his wife, Elisabeth Schumacher, at a recital in January 1937; they married that April. When twins arrived the next January, Pauli congratulated him on his pair creation, a pun on particle physics. Seven children followed in all.
During the Second World War he was a leading scientist in Germany's nuclear programme. Afterwards he directed what became the Max Planck Institute for Physics, helped plan West Germany's first research reactors in 1957 and led the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He died in 1976.
Source: Werner Heisenberg
