Uncertainty [antikvár]

Preface Werner Heisenberg, born at the dawn of the twentieth century, became one of its greatest physicists. He is also among its most controversial. While still in his early twenties, he was among the handful of bright young men who created quantum mechanics, the basic physics of the atom, and he became a leader of nuclear physics and elementary particle research. He is best known for the uncertainty principle, a component of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of the meaning and uses of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg was also a man who chose to reside in Germany throughout his hfe. Born into an academic German family, Heisenberg experienced all the upheavals of the cultural elite in Germany: two lost world wars, a soviet revolution, military occupation, two republics, and Hitler's Third Reich. As the leading non-Jewish theoretical nuclear physicist to remain in Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933, Heisenberg, although not a Nazi, played a prominent role in German nuclear research during World War II, traveled frequently to German occupied territories, and helped to establish West German science after the war. He died in 1976. This is the story of his sometimes difficult life and his often brilliant science. In approaching the life of this man, several questions immediately present themselves. How did this child, born in 1901, climb so quickly to the top of his profession, attaining a full professorship in theoretical physics at the age of 25 and the Nobel prize at the age of 32? What impact did the most turbulent period of his life, the events surrounding