The quantum entered physics with a jolt. It didn’t fit anywhere; it made no sense; it contradicted everything we thought we knew about nature. Yet the data seemed to demand it. … The story of Werner Heisenberg and his science is the story of the desperate failures and ultimate triumphs of the small band of brilliant physicists who-during an incredibly intense period of struggle with the data, the theories, and each other during the 1920s-brought about a revolutionary new understanding of the atomic world known as quantum mechanics.
