“The kinship between the ancient Eastern teachings and the philosophical consequences of the modern quantum theory have fascinated me again and again…” He later confirmed this interest in a letter of 9 July 1971 “After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. His understanding of Indian philosophy helped to put his quantum mechanics in a new light They had a fruitful conversation which helped give Heisenberg a new perspective on the laws of Quantum Physics he had been formulating. In 1929, he met the Indian poet and savant Rabindranath Tagore. Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of thought, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point.” - Heisenberg 1974,

“I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on. In 1974, he was invited to give a lecture on Scientific and Religious Truth where he stated He was raised a Luteran Christian and retained an interest in religious matters throughout his life. Schumacher) in 1937 and they had seven children. Heisenberg married Elisabeth Schumacher (brother of economist E.F.

Under hidden surveillance, Heisenberg said that he was glad Germany had lost the war and was genuinely surprised that the US had succeeded in building a bomb, because the German project never got close. Heisenberg was taken to England where he was placed under surveillance by MI6. Towards the end of the war, he was captured by Allied forces during their special Alsos Mission which sought to examine the German developement of Nuclear weapons and use the knowledge of German scientists in the US’s own nuclear programme. In 1942, he gave a lecture to Reichs officials on the military potential of nuclear fission. In the late 1930s, he refused an opportunity to flee to the US but stayed in Germany during the war. Heisenberg even wrote a letter to Himmler arguing it was wrong to target him. Heisenberg responded by defending himself from increasingly vitriolic attacks in Nazi supporting newspapers. The Aryan League of Physicists “Deutsche Physik,” tried to have him blocked from key posts within Germany. After the election of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in 1933, Heisenberg was attacked in the press for being a ‘white jew’ (An Aryan who acts like a jew). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics for 1932 though the announcement was not made until November 1933. “Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.” He continued to work on aspects of quantum mechanics and developed a strong international reputation in this fields. In 1927, he was appointed head of theoretical physics at the University of Leipzig. In 1925, Heisenberg published his first groundbreaking work on quantum physics “Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen” (“Quantum theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations”), and in 1927, published his famous work on the uncertainty principle. After that he spent three years in Denmark with the great physicist Niels Bohr and this proved a fruitful relationship with Heisenberg being strongly influenced by Bohr’s lectures on quantum atomic physics. He studied physics and mathematics and the University of Munich and received a doctorate in theoretical physics in 1923. He was too young to fight in the First World War by in 1919, briefly served in the Freikorps to fight against the Communist revolution in Bavaria. Heisenberg was born in Wurzburg, Germany on 5 December 1901. “Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language.” For his work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1932. Later physicists slightly modified his quantum theories, but essentially kept it the same. Contrasting with the established view of Newtonian mechanics, Heisenberg proved that at the sub-atomic level, there was not the same certainty, but the outcome was uncertain and based on probabilities. Heisenberg developed new theories for explaining the behaviour of sub-atomic particles. Werner Heisenberg 1901 – 1976) was a German physicist and influential figure in the development of quantum mechanics.

Werner heisenberg atomic theory