Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976)

Werner Karl Heisenberg

Werner Karl Heisenberg (December 5, 1901 – February 1, 1976) was a celebrated German physicist and Nobel laureate, one of the founders of quantum mechanics and acknowledged to be one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century. Heisenberg was the head of the German nuclear energy project under the Nazi regime, though the nature of this project, and his work in this capacity, has been heavily debated. He is most well-known for discovering one of the central principles of modern physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, and for the development of quantum mechanics, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932.

"The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known."
Heisenberg, uncertainty paper, 1927

Max Planck (1858-1947)

Max Planck Biography

Max-Planck-Society

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (April 23, 1858 in Kiel, Germany – October 4, 1947 in Göttingen, Germany) was a German physicist. He is considered to be the founder of quantum theory, and therefore one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century.

At the end of the 1920s Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli had worked out the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, but it was rejected by Planck, as well as Schrödinger and Laue; even Einstein had rejected Bohr's interpretation. Planck expected that wave mechanics would soon render quantum theory—his own child—unnecessary. This was not to be the case, however—further work only cemented quantum theory, even against his and Einstein's philosophical revulsions. Planck experienced the truth of his own earlier observation from his struggle with the older views in his younger years: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."

"What always interested me primarily in physics were the great general laws that are of significance in all natural processes, irrespective of the properties of the bodies undergoing the processes.''
Max Planck, 1943