Werner Heisenberg was a German physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics. His work on the subject revolutionized our understanding of the subatomic world and earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932.
Heisenberg was born in 1901 in Würzburg, Germany. He studied physics at the University of Munich, where he received his PhD in 1923. After a brief stint as a research assistant at the University of Copenhagen, Heisenberg returned to Germany to take up a professorship at the University of Leipzig.
It was during his time at Leipzig that Heisenberg developed his groundbreaking theory of quantum mechanics. In 1925, he published his first paper on the subject, which outlined what would later become known as the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle”. This principle states that certain properties of particles (such as momentum) cannot be known with absolute certainty; rather, they can only be known within certain limits determined by Heisenberg’s famous equation:
p x ō = ħ/2π
This equation has come to be seen as one of the most important results of 20th century physics, and has had a profound impact on our understanding of reality itself.