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)
The Nibelungenlied
The Challenger Expedition 1872-1876
Demosthenes' Philippics
Bauhaus
The Morant Bay Rebellion
Wilfred Owen
The Fish-Tetrapod Transition
Berthe Morisot
The Knights Templar
The Electron
Plato's Atlantis
Nineteen Eighty-Four
John Bull
Angkor Wat
Dylan Thomas
The Death of Stars
Hegel's Philosophy of History
Comenius
Tang Era Poetry
The Davidian Revolution
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
History Extra podcast
Empire
Economist Podcasts
The Intelligence from The Economist
Not Just the Tudors