Werner Heisenberg and the Birth of Quantum Mechanics

Abner Shimony, Patrick A. Heelan

Arkady Plotnitsky

David C. Cassidy

Werner Heisenberg

Abstract The birth of the grand synthesis of quantum theory—now known as “quantum mechanics”—was not the happy event it might have been. To everyone’s surprise, what came into the world was not one infant but two—twins. And to make matters worse, the two births were months apart, with different doctors officiating; there were even some ugly rumors about the parentage of the two arrivals. Erwin Schro¨ dinger and his colleagues in Munich and Berlin, who claimed the child they called “wave mechanics,” found little to admire in the other child, called “matrix mechanics,” claimed by Werner Heisenberg and his friends in Go¨ ttingen and Copenhagen. Said Schro¨ dinger about matrix mechanics: “I was discouraged, if not repelled, by what seemed to me a rather difficult method of transcendental algebra, defying any visualization.”

Kristian Camilleri

Venkat Venkatasubramanian

High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide In July 1925, Werner Heisenberg submitted a paper to Zeitschrift für Physik entitled ‘On quantum-theoretical reinterpretation of kinematic and mechanical relationships’, thus giving birth to quantum mechanics. In the following year, building on de Broglie’s wave-particle duality, Erwin Schrödinger developed wave mechanics, and soon, Max Born provided a probabilistic interpretation of the wave function. The theory was further enriched by the exclusion principle of Wolfgang Pauli and the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg, which ultimately led to the development of relativistic quantum mechanics by Dirac. The Copenhagen Interpretation created a probabilistic framework for understanding the theory. Over the past century, quantum mechanics has paved the way for advances in quantum field theory, computing, and modern technologies. This historical narrative provides insights into the complex discovery process that led to the development of quantum mechanics, which can potentially guide novel breakthroughs amid challenging conceptual struggles, as seen in the field of artificial intelligence today.