Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976)

Werner Heisenberg was one of the greatest physicists of all times.

When he started out as a young research worker, the world of physics was in a very confused and frustrating state, which Abraham Pais has described¹ as:

It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair

using Charles Dickens' words in A Tale of Two Cities. People were playing a guessing game: There were from time to time great triumphs in proposing, through sheer intuition, make-shift schemes that amazingly explained some regularities in spectral physics, leading to joy. But invariably such successes would be followed by further work which reveal the inconsistency or inadequacy of the new scheme, leading to despair…