Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the German physicist who, at the age of 23 and while still a student, effectively created quantum mechanics for which he later won the Nobel Prize. Werner Heisenberg made this breakthrough in a paper in 1925 when, rather than starting with an idea of where atomic particles were at any one time, he worked backwards from what he observed of atoms and their particles and the light they emitted, doing away with the idea of their continuous orbit of the nucleus and replacing this with equations. This was momentous and from this flowed what’s known as his Uncertainty Principle, the idea that, for example, you can accurately measure the position of an atomic particle or its momentum, but not both.
With
Fay Dowker Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London
Harry Cliff Research Fellow in Particle Physics at the University of Cambridge
And
Frank Close Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics and Fellow Emeritus at Exeter College at the University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Reading list:
Philip Ball, Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew about Quantum Physics Is Different (Vintage, 2018)
John Bell, ‘Against 'measurement'’ (Physics World, Vol 3, No 8, 1990)
Mara Beller, Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2001)
David C. Cassidy, Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, And The Bomb (Bellevue Literary Press, 2010)
Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (first published 1958; Penguin Classics, 2000)
Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland: The Strange and Beautiful Story of Quantum Physics (Penguin, 2022)
Journey to the West
Longitude
The Second Barons' War
Ovid
The Franco-American Alliance 1778
Arianism
Pierre-Simon Laplace
The Russo-Japanese War
David Ricardo
The Bacchae
The Late Devonian Extinction
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Marcus Aurelius
Medieval Pilgrimage
The Rosetta Stone
Emilie du Châtelet
Saint Cuthbert
The Plague of Justinian
The Great Gatsby
Eclipses
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Empire
History Extra podcast
The Rest Is History
Freakonomics Radio
The Daily Show: Ears Edition