Werner Heisenberg

Werner Heisenberg formulated quantum mechanics in 1925 at twenty-three, on Heligoland, recovering from hay fever, and two years later the uncertainty principle: that position and momentum cannot both be known with precision, not through any failure of instruments but because nature is so. He won the Nobel Prize at thirty-one. He led the German atomic project during the war, and what he intended remains disputed. Physics and Philosophy, from the Gifford Lectures of 1955, is his account of what quantum theory means for the older ideas of reality, causation and knowledge, and it is the book the lists assign.