Werner Heisenberg foundation of the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics through only the use of observables. In February 1943, Heisenberg was appointed to the Chair for Theoretical Physics at the "Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität" (today, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). In April, his election to the "Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften" (Prussian Academy of Sciences) was approved. That same month, he moved his family to their retreat in as Allied bombing increased in Berlin. In the summer, he dispatched the first of his staff at the "Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Physik" to Hechingen and its neighboring town of Haigerloch, on the edge of the Black Forest, for the
Werner Heisenberg main new idea, non-commuting matrices, is justified only by a rejection of unobservable quantities. It introduces the non-commutative multiplication of matrices by physical reasoning, based on the correspondence principle, despite the fact that Heisenberg was not then familiar with the mathematical theory of matrices. The path leading to these results has been reconstructed in MacKinnon, 1977, and the detailed calculations are worked out in Aitchison et al. In Copenhagen, Heisenberg and Hans Kramers collaborated on a paper on dispersion, or the scattering from atoms of radiation whose wavelength is larger than the atoms. They showed that the successful formula Kramers