Werner Heisenberg

High school (ages 12+)
Science & Technology

Name:

Date:

Step 1 · Read the article

Open the article and read it at the level above. Then answer the questions below in your own words.

https://smallwhale.org/articles/werner-heisenberg

Write what each word means, using the article.

Do not copy the article. Write two things you learned, the way you would explain them to a friend.

Answers below are taken from the article’s stored facts, so they match what the student read.

1. When was Werner Heisenberg born?December 5, 1901
2. Where was Werner Heisenberg born?Würzburg, Bavaria, Germany
3. When did Werner Heisenberg die?February 1, 1976 (age 74)
4. What is the career?Theoretical physicist, professor, director of research institutes, leader of German nuclear program
5. Who was Werner Heisenberg?He was a German physicist born in 1901 who won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics.
6. What is the Uncertainty Principle?The Uncertainty Principle says you can't know a particle's exact position and momentum at the same time; the more you know one, the less you know the other, and their uncertainties multiply to at least a tiny constant.

Quantum Mechanics: A fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.
Uncertainty Principle: A principle stating that there is a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of complementary physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, can be known simultaneously.
Matrix Mechanics: An early formulation of quantum mechanics developed by Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan, which uses mathematical matrices to represent physical observables.
Wave Mechanics: An alternative formulation of quantum mechanics developed by Erwin Schrödinger, which uses wave functions to describe the behavior of quantum systems.