Nobel Prize winner Werner Heisenberg's classic account explains the central ideas of the quantum revolution, and his celebrated Uncertainty Principle. Heisenberg reveals how words and concepts familiar in daily life can lose their meaning in the world of relativity and quantum physics. This in turn has profound philosophical implications for the nature of reality.
Werner Heisenberg was a German physicist. Born in 1901 to an academic family, Heisenberg was interested in scientific and philosophical pursuits from a young age. After graduating from the University of Munich, where he studied under physicist Arthur Sommerfield, Heisenberg went on to establish a career in the study of atomic and particle theory. He won the Nobel Prize in 1932 for his Uncertainty Principle. Heisenberg was one of the top German scientists during World War II, and he worked as the director of the German Uranium Project developing an atomic bomb for Germany. He did not succeed in this effort, however, before the end of the war. He was incarcerated from 1945 to 1946 for his role in the Nazi regime, but in the 1950s and 1960s, Heisenberg continued to contribute his research to the field of nuclear physics. He retired in 1970 and resided in Munich until his death in 1973.