Werner Heisenberg

Werner Heisenberg is the physicist who taught the world that there are limits to what can be known. Still in his twenties, he built the first complete version of quantum mechanics and then uncovered the principle that bears his name, the rule that a particle cannot have both a definite position and a definite momentum at the same time. In doing so Heisenberg overturned centuries of confidence that nature was, in principle, perfectly predictable. This is the story of a dazzling young talent who reshaped physics in a single decade, and of a complicated figure whose later life ran through the darkest chapter of the twentieth century. It covers the breakthrough of matrix mechanics, the uncertainty principle that made Heisenberg famous, his central role in the Copenhagen interpretation, and the lasting questions about his work during the Second World War.…