Hans-Peter Dürr’s scientific contributions

This second Series A volume of Werner Heisenberg's Collected Works covers a period of about 15 years beginning with the early papers on quantum field theory in 1929/30 and ending with those on the scattering matrix (up to 1946). The reader will find Heisenberg contributions to Dirac's theory of the electron, to nuclear physics, to cosmic ray phenomena, and to reactor physics. The papers on the Uranium Project, classified for a long time and never fully published before, will certainly attract a wide audience. As in the first volume, each group of papers is furnished with an introduction in English by an eminent scientist. The contributing scientists are: R. Haag, A. Pais, C.F. von Weizsäcker, E. Bagge, K. Wirtz, and R. Oehme.

Werner Karl Heisenberg was born in Würzburg, Germany, on 5 December 1901. His father, August Heisenberg (1869–1930), stemmed from a family of master craftsmen in Osnabrück, and had studied classical philology in Munich; at the time of Werner’s birth he held the dual positions of teacher at the Altes Gymnasium in Würzburg and Privatdozent for Greek philology at the University of Würzburg. His mother was Anna Wecklein, the daughter of Nikolaus Wecklein (1843–1926), a classical philologist and rector of the Maximilians-Gymnasium in Munich. They married in 1899 and their first son, Erwin, was born in Munich in 1900; he later became a chemist and worked in industry (he died in 1965).