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Werner Heisenberg’s Path to Matrix Mechanics
In 1925, Werner Heisenberg—through a combination of intuition and sometimes brilliant guesswork, and strongly influenced by the previous works of Einstein, Ladenburg and Kramers—created his inchoate version of quantum mechanics.
In the public mind, Werner Heisenberg’s name is indelibly associated with his famous uncertainty principle. That formulation, published in 1927, was only part of an intensive struggle by Heisenberg beginning in 1925 to move past the “old” quantum theory of Niels Bohr and Arnold Sommerfeld to a new, mathematically consistent quantum mechanics. In that struggle, Heisenberg, along with Max Born and Pascual Jordan at the University of Göttingen, fashioned a version of quantum mechanics that came to be called matrix mechanics.
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