ABSTRACT
Werner Heisenberg, a 29-year-old professor of physics at the University of Leipzig, told Bohr in 1931 that he had given up concerning himself with fundamental questions, “which are too difcult for me.” Heisenberg had in mind his failure to explain the physics of the atomic nucleus with the quantum mechanics that he had invented only ve years earlier. In the Christmas issue of the Berliner Tageblatt, he wrote that progress on fundamental questions such as the quantum mechanics of the nucleus would have to wait for new discoveries about that small piece of matter at the heart of the atom. “Whether indeed the year 1932 will lead us to such knowledge is quite doubtful.”
