Where are Heisenberg's Lost Notes?

[Lamarr]

i was reading a Murray Gell Mann interview and he mentioned that Heisenberg became a crank in his later years.

I've tried very hard but I cannot find what Heisenberg was working on. My motivation is, there may be some bits of genius among that pile of crackpottery.

 

[vanhees71]

I guess Gell-Mann is referring to Heisenberg's non-linear Dirac equation. From the fact that nobody talks about this nowadays anymore, you can reach your own conclusions ;-). You find a review by Heisenberg himself in

W. Heisenberg, Rev. Mod. Phys. 29, 269 (1957)
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/RevModPhys.29.269

 

[Lamarr]

Well, what's the key problem in his theory?

Also, I'm currently broke, so I can't read the review.

 

[harrylin]

I guess Gell-Mann is referring to Heisenberg's non-linear Dirac equation. From the fact that nobody talks about this nowadays anymore, you can reach your own conclusions ;-). You find a review by Heisenberg himself in

W. Heisenberg, Rev. Mod. Phys. 29, 269 (1957)
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/RevModPhys.29.269

Thanks for the reference!
It looks however as if you call a number of people "nobody":

"96 citing articles found:

1.
Nonlinear Spinor Fields and Its Role in Cosmology
Bijan Saha
International Journal of Theoretical Physics , (2012)

2.
Matter-gravity couplings and Lorentz violation
V. Alan Kostelecký and Jay D. Tasson
Phys. Rev. D 83, 016013 (2011)

3.
Four-fermion interaction from torsion as dark energy
Nikodem J. Popławski
General Relativity and Gravitation , (2011)

4.
Reproducing gravity through spinor fields
M. Novello, M. Borba
Gravitation and Cosmology 17, 224 (2011)

5.
Lorentz violation with an antisymmetric tensor
Brett Altschul, Quentin G. Bailey, and V. Alan Kostelecký
Phys. Rev. D 81, 065028 (2010)

6.
Approximate gauge symmetry of composite vector bosons
Mahiko Suzuki
Phys. Rev. D 82, 045026 (2010)

7.
Derivation of Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation
Xiang-Yao Wu, Bai-Jun Zhang, Xiao-Jing Liu, Li Xiao, Yi-Heng Wu, Yan Wang, Qing-Cai Wang, Shuang Cheng
International Journal of Theoretical Physics , (2010)

[..]

17.
Constructing Dirac linear fermions in terms of non-linear Heisenberg spinors
M. Novello
EPL (Europhysics Letters) 80, 41001 (2007) "

 

[ImaLooser]

Well, what's the key problem in his theory?

Also, I'm currently broke, so I can't read the review.

I have read that H was working with Wolfgang Pauli on something ambitious in their later years. Pauli was quite excited about it. P went to the USA and presented the theory but could not answer the objections. P gave up on it and seems to have been quite embarrassed by the whole thing, as he prided himself on having "never believed in anything that was wrong." P gave up research after that.