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60 free Werner Heisenberg trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Werner Heisenberg trivia quiz covers the physicist who created quantum mechanics at 23 and spent the war at the centre of Germany's nuclear programme. The easy questions handle the uncertainty principle, the Nobel Prize, the island where matrix mechanics was born and the TV chemistry teacher who borrowed his name. From there it moves through the life: the professor of Greek who was his father, the Freikorps summer, the doctorate on turbulence, the Scout trip to Finland, the piano, and the economist brother-in-law. The harder end covers the cocaine-and-aspirin hay fever cure, the letter that first described uncertainty, the 'White Jew' affair and Himmler's intervention, the meeting with Speer, the Black Forest reactor, Moe Berg's pistol, the Farm Hall recordings, the CERN job he turned down and the philosophy he found in Plato and the Tao. Every answer was checked against Heisenberg's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our physics and famous physicists quizzes are the natural next stop.
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Q 01For which year was Heisenberg awarded his Nobel Prize, announced belatedly in November 1933?
1932
Einstein had nominated him, together with Born and Jordan, back in 1928.
Q 02Heisenberg's Nobel citation was 'for the creation of' what?
Quantum mechanics
It added that its application had led to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen.
Q 03In which German city was Heisenberg born in 1901?
Wurzburg
His son Martin later became a neurobiologist at the university there.
Q 04Heisenberg's father held Germany's only full professorship in what subject?
Medieval and modern Greek
He had begun as a secondary-school teacher of classical languages.
Q 05As a teenager Heisenberg read which Plato dialogue while hiking in the Bavarian Alps?
Timaeus
He later said 'modern physics has definitely decided in favour of Plato': the smallest units of matter are forms, not objects.
Q 06In 1919 the teenage Heisenberg was in Munich as a Freikorps member fighting what?
The Bavarian Soviet Republic
Decades later he called it 'playing cops and robbers'; his duties were seizing bicycles and typewriters from 'red' offices.
Q 07Under which professor did Heisenberg take his doctorate at Munich in 1923?
Arnold Sommerfeld
Sommerfeld took him to Gottingen in 1922 to hear Bohr lecture, a meeting that changed his life.
Q 08Heisenberg's doctoral thesis was on which decidedly non-quantum topic?
Turbulence
He returned briefly to the stability of laminar flow after the Second World War.
Q 09Heisenberg first met Niels Bohr at the 1922 'Bohr Festival' lectures held in which town?
Gottingen
The seven lectures coincided with the town's Handel festival, hence the nickname.
Q 10As a Scout leader in August 1923, Heisenberg organised a group trip to which country?
Finland
He belonged to the Neupfadfinder, part of the German Youth Movement.
Q 11Which instrument did Heisenberg, an accomplished musician, play for friends throughout his life?
Piano
He met his wife Elisabeth at a private music recital in January 1937.
Q 12Heisenberg's brother-in-law, the economist E. F. Schumacher, wrote which famous book?
Small Is Beautiful
Elisabeth Schumacher married Heisenberg in April 1937, three months after they met.
Q 13When Heisenberg's twins were born in 1938, a physicist friend congratulated him on his what?
'Pair creation'
The pun on pair production was typical Pauli; five more children followed over the next 12 years.
Q 21Heisenberg's first paper as a full professor used the Pauli exclusion principle to explain what?
Ferromagnetism
The video game villain Karl Heisenberg in Resident Evil Village owes his magnetic powers to this work.
Q 22Which airship arrived in Tokyo in August 1929 along with Heisenberg and Paul Dirac?
The Graf Zeppelin
It was the last leg of a lecture tour that took him through China, Japan, India and the United States.
Q 23In 1933 Heisenberg presented his theory of which particle, predicted by Dirac and found by Carl Anderson in 1932?
The positron
He reinterpreted Dirac's equation as a field equation allowing particles to be created and destroyed.
Q 14How many children did Werner and Elisabeth Heisenberg have in all?
Seven
Martin became a neurobiologist and Jochen a physics professor in New Hampshire.
Q 15On which pollen-free island did Heisenberg work out his new mechanics in 1925?
Helgoland
The result was the Umdeutung ('reinterpretation') paper published that September.
Q 16Before retreating to the island, Heisenberg had tried to treat his hay fever with aspirin and what?
Cocaine
Neither worked, which is why he fled to the sea.
Q 17With Max Born and which other physicist did Heisenberg develop matrix mechanics in 1925?
Pascual Jordan
Born recognised that Heisenberg's strange arrays were matrices, then a tool of pure mathematics few physicists knew.
Q 18Heisenberg first described his uncertainty principle in a February 1927 letter to whom?
Wolfgang Pauli
He was working in Copenhagen as Bohr's assistant at the time.
Q 19The German word Heisenberg actually used in his 1927 paper, 'Ungenauigkeit', means what?
Imprecision
'Uncertainty' was a later translation that stuck.
Q 20At 25, Heisenberg became Germany's youngest full professor at which university?
Leipzig
Teller, Oppenheimer, Bloch, Peierls and Weisskopf were among those who came to hear him.
Q 24After Chadwick's 1932 discovery, Heisenberg proposed a nucleus built from protons and what?
Neutrons
The three papers on the neutron-proton model appeared just as the Nazis came to power.
Q 25With which label did the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps attack Heisenberg?
'White Jew'
The Deutsche Physik movement despised relativity and quantum theory as 'Jewish physics'.
Q 26Which Nazi leader ended the attacks on Heisenberg in 1938 with letters to Heydrich and Heisenberg?
Heinrich Himmler
The two men's mothers knew each other; Heisenberg's mother paid Himmler's mother a visit.
Q 27Who got Sommerfeld's Munich chair instead of Heisenberg, in what was seen as a travesty?
Wilhelm Muller
He was not a theoretical physicist and had never published in a physics journal.
Q 28What was the German nuclear weapons programme, formed on the day the war began, called?
Uranverein
The 'Uranium Club' met for the first time on 16 September 1939 in Berlin.
Q 29In June 1942 Heisenberg told Albert Speer a bomb could not be built before which year?
1945
After that the German project focused on nuclear power rather than weapons.
Q 30Heisenberg's reactor work moved to Hechingen and Haigerloch, on the edge of which upland region?
The Black Forest
The area later fell into the French zone, but the American Alsos team got there first.