In spite of this brilliant work, he nearly failed the experimental part of the doctoral exam with Willy Wien. On the publication of Heisenberg’s first paper in this field in 1922, Sommerfeld remarked to Heisenberg’s father: “You belong to an irreproachable family of philologists, and now you have the misfortune of seeing the sudden appearance of a mathematical-physical genius in your family.” In his PhD thesis, Heisenberg suggested the first method for deriving the critical Reynolds number, marking the transition from laminar to turbulent motion.

Simultaneously he studied the classical hydrodynamical turbulence problem. The freshman found a perfect solution – exhibiting, however, unusual half-integral quantum numbers and a strangely behaving atomic core. In the very first semester Sommerfeld gave Heisenberg the difficult problem of explaining the anomalous Zeeman effect of sodium spectral lines. Thus he became a member of the great international post-First World War community of quantum and atomic theorists, including such brilliant talents as Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, Friedrich Hund, Pascual Jordan, Oskar Klein, Hendrik Kramers, Wolfgang Pauli and Gregor Wentzel. In 1924 Niels Bohr invited him to Copenhagen. He studied under Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich, obtaining his PhD in July 1923 and then went on to work under Max Born in Göttingen. Werner Heisenberg, born in Würzburg, came from an academic family and after 1910 grew up in Munich, where he graduated with distinction from high school in 1920. He also established several fundamental quantum mechanics applications and pioneered the extension of the theory to high-energy phenomena. His famous uncertainty relations were a central part of its interpretation. It is to him that we owe the first breakthrough of modern atomic theory – the invention of quantum mechanics. This year, 5 December marks the centenary of Werner Heisenberg’s birth. Fame through uncertainty: quantum mechanics pioneer Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s.

Helmut Rechenberg, Heisenberg’s last postgraduate, co-editor of his collected works and co-author of the multivolume opus The Historical Development of Quantum Theory, traces the life of a quantum figurehead. This year marks the centenary of the birth of Werner Heisenberg, pioneer of quantum mechanics and theoretical high-energy physics.

Heisenberg atomic theory