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Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901 - 1976) was a German physicist and philosopher who discovered (1925) a way
to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices. For that discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize
for Physics for 1932. In 1927 he published his uncertainty principle, upon which he built his philosophy and
for which he is best known.
In 1923 he took his Ph.D. at the University of Munich and then became Assistant to Max Born at the
University of Göttingen. In 1926 he was appointed Lecturer in Theoretical Physics at the University of
Copenhagen under Niels Bohr and in 1927 he was appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at the
University of Leipzig.
In 1941 he was appointed Professor of Physics at the University of Berlin and Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Physics there. He led the “Uranverein” or “Uranium Club” working on the German atomic bomb
project.
At the end of the Second World War he, and other German physicists, were taken prisoner by American
troops and sent to England, but in 1946 he returned to Germany and reorganized, with his colleagues, the
Institute for Physics at Göttingen. This Institute was, in 1948, renamed the Max Planck Institute for Physics.
During 1955 Heisenberg was occupied with preparations for the removal of the Max Planck Institute for
Physics to Munich. Still Director of this Institute, he went with it to Munich and in 1958 he was appointed
Professor of Physics at the University of Munich
Lise Meitner (1878 - 1968) was an Austrian physicist. She obtained her doctorate degree in 1906 at the University of Vienna. She went to Berlin in 1907 to study with Max Planck and the chemist Otto Hahn. She worked together with Hahn for 30 years, studying radioactivity, with her knowledge of physics and his knowledge of chemistry.
In 1923, Meitner discovered the radiationless transition known as the Auger effect , which is named for Pierre Victor Auger, a French scientist who discovered the effect two years later.
After Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938, Meitner was forced to flee Germany for Sweden.
Hahn and Meitner met clandestinely in Copenhagen in November 1938 to plan a new round of experiments. The experiments that provided the evidence for nuclear fission were done at Hahn's laboratory in Berlin and published in January 1939. In February 1939, Meitner published the physical explanation for the observations and, with her nephew, physicist Otto Frisch, named the process nuclear fission. The discovery led other scientists to prompt Albert Einstein to write President Franklin D. Roosevelt a warning letter, which led to the Manhattan Project.
In 1944, Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his research into fission, but Meitner was ignored .
Meitner retired to Cambridge, England, in 1960.In 1992, element 109, the heaviest known element in the universe, was named Meitnerium (Mt) in her honour.
From 1965, the University of Copenhagen Institute for Theoretical Physics. (UITF - Universitetets Institut for Teoretisk Fysik) was renamed the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI). |
