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students received instruction in Latin, Greek, mathematics, and, to a much lesser extent, subjects such as history, geography, and athletics. Physics was an afterthought. Werner quickly established himself as a star in mathematics.
    August Heisenberg was ambitious not only for himself but for his sons as well. His desire for hearty sons was manifest in frequent “tests” pitting one son against another. These games probably contributed to Werner's obsessive competitiveness. They also bred extreme antipathy: By mid-adolescence, the brothers were fighting bitterly. Their relationship remained frosty at best throughout their lives.
    When World War I intervened, not only was Werner's schooling transformed, so too was his home life. His father, an army officer, was immediately called to active duty. He served enthusiastically, eventually volunteering for the front. Within two weeks, his naïve patriotism was tempered by the “pain, misery and suffering” he witnessed. 3 He requested a transfer back to Munich in April, leaving the young men in his regiment to fight an old man's war.
    Transformed, too, was Werner's educational experience. A new building built for the Gymnasium was turned over to the military. Some faculty went off to the war, only to return quickly, as had Werner's father. Of the seventy-four young students who enlisted, more than one-third were killed. The Gymnasium, in addition to supplying cannon fodder in the form of its pupils, exhorted the younger students to displays of patriotism in support of the war. Werner joined the “Military Preparedness Association,” a national organization with chapters at each Gymnasium. Had the war continued, Werner, who turned seventeen in December 1918, would undoubtedly have served.
    One interlude during the war may have changed Heisenbergprofoundly. In 1917, he spent a long summer in the countryside, where he and other students joined in harvesting much-needed hay. There, imbued with the romanticism of hard labor, he studied mathematics and played chess.
    In 1920, Heisenberg began studies at the University of Munich. He dazzled his professors, publishing important papers on atomic structure while still a fledgling student. His early love of mathematics was about to pay off. During his last years at the Gymnasium, he had worked through the mathematics of general relativity. His conversion to physics came late in his Gymnasium studies.
    All around him, Germany was in chaos. Steeped in the elitist politics of his upper-middle-class academic family, Heisenberg remained with the patriotic Military Preparedness Association, renamed the Young Bavaria League. It encouraged near-cultlike “retreats” into the countryside, where leaders like Heisenberg conducted seminars on truth, honesty, and the cleansing power of nature. Nominally apolitical, the group offered a romantic alternative to the difficult politics of the Weimar Republic. Throughout the early 1920s, groups like Heisenberg's habitually broke off from one organization and joined another. Heisenberg's group seems to have resisted joining any of the more virulent anti-Semitic organizations and retained its devotion to nature and traditional values. Still, he was drawn to science as a transforming enterprise, hoping to work in “those fields in which it was not simply a question of the further development of what is already known.” 4
    The early 1920s brought about such transformation in our knowledge of the atom that the world still reels from the impact. Heisenberg and his fellow student–colleague Pauli joined Arnold Sommerfeld's Theoretical Physics Institute in Munich. Soon, Heisenberg and Pauli were collaborating with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and Max Born in Göttingen on what would becomethe new quantum physics. It was Heisenberg—sometimes with Bohr's approbation, sometimes without—who forged the beginnings of quantum mechanics and hit upon the uncertainty principle.