Jochen Heisenberg (born 16 May 1939) is a German physicist specializing in

nuclear physics Nuclear physics is the field of physics that studies atomic nuclei and their constituents and interactions, in addition to the study of other forms of nuclear matter. Nuclear physics should not be confused with atomic physics, which studies t ...

, and Professor Emeritus of Physics at the

University of New Hampshire The University of New Hampshire (UNH) is a public land-grant research university with its main campus in Durham, New Hampshire. It was founded and incorporated in 1866 as a land grant college in Hanover in connection with Dartmouth College, mov ...

. He is the son of

Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfre ...

-winning physicist

Werner Heisenberg Werner Karl Heisenberg () (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematis ...

, who was a co-founder of the

quantum mechanics Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles. It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, ...

, and who, in particular, introduced the

uncertainty principle In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (also known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the accuracy with which the values for certain pairs of physic ...

. He is the brother of German

neurobiologist A neuroscientist (or neurobiologist) is a scientist who has specialised knowledge in neuroscience, a branch of biology that deals with the physiology, biochemistry, psychology, anatomy and molecular biology of neurons, neural circuits, and ...

and

geneticist A geneticist is a biologist or physician who studies genetics, the science of genes, heredity, and variation of organisms. A geneticist can be employed as a scientist or a lecturer. Geneticists may perform general research on genetic process ...

Martin Heisenberg and the uncle of film director Benjamin Heisenberg.

Professional career

Heisenberg studied physics with

Willibald Jentschke Willibald Jentschke (Vienna, Austria-Hungary, 6 December 1911 – Göttingen, Germany, 11 March 2002) was an Austrian-German experimental nuclear physicist. During World War II, he made contributions to the German nuclear energy project. Afte ...

at the University of Hamburg and received his PhD in 1968. He then spent a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

. From 1970 to 1978 he was a member of the faculty at the MIT. During his early career at Stanford and MIT, Heisenberg participated in numerous experimental studies of nuclear reactions. Using the Bates Linear Accelerator, he published numerous papers on electroexcitations. After his move to UNH, he began to study methods for theoretical prediction of such reactions. During the past ten years, he has been active in the development of computational models of large nuclei and has published several papers on these topics.

Historical perspectives

Heisenberg has spoken several times to provide an historical perspective on the activities of his father during and after World War II. He has been invited to comment on Michael Frayn's well-known play ''

Copenhagen Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan ...

'' and has published his perspectives on his father's activities. He maintained a
informational website
containing biographical information and reference material on

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Heisenberg, Jochen 1939 births German nuclear physicists Jochen Living people University of New Hampshire faculty University of Hamburg alumni Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich alumni 20th-century German physicists Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty