<<1915-1950>>



Werner Heisenberg was born on December 5, 1901 at Wurzburg. He studied physics at the University of Munich. He won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1932. He formulated a new theory in terms of matrix equations. His new theory was based on what you can observe. That is to say on the radiation emitted by the atom. We cannot, he said, always assign to an electron a position in space at a given time, nor follow it in orbit. He then states his famous principle of uncertainty. Saying that there are errors in determining the position and momentum of a mobile particle. He was married and had seven children and one of his hobbies was classical music.

Erwin Schrodinger was born on August 12, 1887 in Vienna. He was a highly gifted man with a broad education. He contributed to the wave theory of matter and to other fundamentals of quantum mechanics. He received his doctorate in 1910 for the University of Vienna. He produced the papers that gave the foundations of quantum wave mechanics. In those papers he described his partial differential equation that Is the basic equation of quantum mechanics and bears the same relation to the mechanics of the atom. Of all of the physicists of his generation, Schrodinger stands out because of his extraordinary intellectual versatility.

James Chadwick was born in 1891 in Manchester, England. He graduated Manchester University in 1911 and worked with Ernest Rutherford. He discovered the neutron in 1932, resulting in the solution of the jug saw puzzle for the weight of atoms. He received the Nobel Prize in 1935. Chadwick smashed alpha particles in beryllium, a rare metallic element and allowed the radiation that was released to hit another target: paraffin wax. When they hit they were sent into detecting chambers. Chadwick’s discovery advanced experimental work for all scientists. Since neutrons have no electrical charge, any neutrons fired from a source have the ability to go through deep layers of materials and to go into the nuclei of the target atoms. He won the Nobel Prize for this discovery in 1935.