He
came up with the “uncertainty principle.”He won a Nobel Prize for his part in the creation of quantum mechanics.
And
these accomplishments created a physics that baffles most of us, and
yet paved the way for amazing things: transistors, microprocessors,
computers, cell phones, random number generators, and lasers. All
those things may seem very commonplace to you—but I urge you to
contemplate how different your life would be without any of this
stuff, and I point out that most of the people who have ever lived
had none of it.
We
do live in amazing times, truly!
Uncertain
about uncertainty?
You
probably know that physicists use a lot of math to explore reality.
The uncertainty principle is a variety of mathematical inequalities
that show that we cannot measure exactly all the physical properties
of a subatomic particle. In other words, we can never know both the
position AND the momentum of a particle.
It's
a bit like saying that we cannot know where a car is AND what
direction it is traveling, at what speed. That seems silly—I bet
you want to say “of course we can!”
But
quantum physics is the physics of the very, very small—and when you
are looking at things that are the size of an atom or electron, they
don't always behave as we in the larger world expect.
Here's
one kid-friendly explanation of the uncertainty principle. (I am
uncertain whether or not this explanation is exactly accurate...but
what could be more appropriate for an explanation of this principle
than a little uncertainty and lack of precision!)
Heisenberg
and World War II
Werner
Heisenberg, born on this date in 1902, was a German physicist during
the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany. Some anti-Semitic (anti-Jew)
physicists in Germany accused Heisenberg of being a “White Jew”
(which was in their eyes an insult), and some said he should be “made
to disappear.” Why did they hate this brilliant, prize-winning,
Aryan (“white” German) scientist?
Two
reasons: First, Heisenberg admired Einstein's contributions to
physics, and he said so to his students. At the time, Nazis hated
Einstein because he was Jewish but also because Einstein was a
pacifist and humanist who believed in equality.
Second,
some of the second-rate German physicists who hated Heisenberg didn't
understand his discoveries and theories. They wanted to stick to
classical physics and ignore what they called “Jewish physics.”
Heisenberg
and his work in physics were viciously attacked in German newspapers,
yet Heisenberg refused to emigrate to the U.S. as Einstein and some
other other German scientists (mostly Jewish) did.
Heisenberg
was saved from possible punishment from the Nazis by the fact that
his mother and the mother of the head of the Gestapo (Nazi secret
police) were friends.
I
don't want to make Heisenberg sound like a hero. He compromised
himself by staying in Germany and working with the Nazis. He still
taught students about Einstein's theories, but without mentioning
Einstein at all. Although Heisenberg wasn't political, he thought of
himself as very practical—and it seemed to him that the Nazis were
going to win World War II. As the chief theorist of the Nazi's
Uranium Project, he wondered about the morality of inventing an
atomic bomb to help his country win the war. He angered his former
mentor, Niels Bohr, who thought Heisenberg was eagerly helping Hitler
to gain an atomic weapon.
In
actual fact, Heisenberg and other German scientists may have
deliberately sabotaged the German efforts to invent a bomb. They
seemed to have concentrated, instead, on inventing a nuclear reactor,
a way of creating nuclear energy.
The
whole subject about what Heisenberg did or did not do during World
War II is pretty controversial and to even shrouded in mystery. If
you want to read more, check out the National WWII Museum's blog.
Also
on this date:
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