Happy Birthday, Werner!*

He was a staunch anti-communist, a street-fighter in his youth, and an arrogant man. He was a student of science, who scored the best grades in theory and the lowest grades in experiment; he was someone, who was awarded a PhD (with a grading of "C") as a compromise solution (after a bitter debate between Sommerfeld, his supervisor, and Wien, his examiner), due to his very poor performance in the experimental part of his oral examination.

But he was also the person, who at the age of 25 discovered Qunatum Mechanics (without knowing that he was dealing with Matrix Algebra, and Max Born, after a chance meeting with Pascual Jordan in a train at Hannover, two of the few people in Europe back then who knew about Matrices, would have to point it out to our guy what it was!), and at 26 one of the corner-stones of Physics, known as the Uncertainty principle. And yet, his theory of atomic structure, put forward with Mayorana, would turn out to be as incorrect as it could be. They even put electrons inside the nucleus!

He was nicknamed "white Jew" by the Nazis, and yet he would end up working for Hitler's Atomic Bomb project. He presumably won't do much to save his Jewish colleagues. The issue of whether he had no clue on how to make an Atomic bomb, or if he conscientiously avoided making one would be the topic of many debates over the decades.

His arrogance would make him completely unaccommodative regarding Schoedinger's version of Quantum Mechanics, that is Wave Mechanics. It would take John von Neumann of Hungary (beware of the Hungarians!) to show the equivalence of the two approaches.

*Werner Karl Heisenberg (5th December, 1901 - 1st February, 1976)

Note: Due to maintanance of Blogger.com, this posting is being added on 6th December, 12-30 AM)

__________________________________________________________________
Sources:
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p01.htm
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Heisenberg.html
http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1932/heisenberg-bio.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle
http://www.aip.org/history/heisenberg/p06.htm
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/heisenb2.htm

http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/eht.html