Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) was one of the founders of quantum mechanics — author of the uncertainty principle (1927) and winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was also among the most philosophically engaged physicists of the century. In his late teens he read Plato’s Timaeus in the original Greek (his father was a professor of Greek), and the dialogue’s central idea stayed with him: that the smallest constituents of matter are not material objects but mathematical forms.

In Physics and Philosophy (1958), Heisenberg argued that modern physics \.