Jochen Heisenberg


Jochen Heisenberg is a German physicist specializing in nuclear physics, and Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of New Hampshire. He is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was a co-founder of the quantum mechanics, and who, in particular, introduced the uncertainty principle. He is the brother of German neurobiologist and geneticist Martin Heisenberg and the uncle of film director Benjamin Heisenberg.

Professional career

Heisenberg studied physics with Willibald Jentschke at the University of Hamburg and received his PhD in 1968. He then spent a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University. From 1970-1978 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 and has published his perspectives on his father's activities. He maintained an containing biographical information and reference material on Werner Heisenberg.