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I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, at the age of 23, German physics student Werner Heisenberg effectively created

quantum mechanics for which he later won the Nobel Prize. He made this breakthrough in a paper

in 1925 when he worked backwards from what he observed

of atoms and their particles and did away with the idea of continuous orbit replacing this

with equations, as we'll hear 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.

We need to explain and discuss Heisenberg on his uncertainty principle are Faye Dauker, 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 Oxley.

Frank, what was there in his background that suggested he was going to go in that direction. Well, he was born in 1901 in Bavaria, and his father was a teacher of classics and Greek.

And I think that the young Werner was very interested in the ideas of Plato. He read Plato while he was hiking in the Bavarian mountains.

And the reason I think that that was important for him is that later he made a remark, which was that the smallest units of matter are not particles in an ordinary sense, but forms ideas only expressed in mathematical language.

So I think it was that classical background from his father that perhaps made him look that way.

But he became interested obviously in

maths and physics and that was what he went to study as an undergraduate at

Munich and then Gertingen from 1920 to 23.

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