In 1958, Werner Heisenberg, in his 57th year, jumped the shark. At the Max Planck centennial in Berlin, he presented what others would label his Weltformel (World Formula), a final theory reducing all of physics, known and unknown, to the interactions of one elementary quantum field. This caused a substantial media splash, but eventually, especially due to the strong rejection from his old colleague and short-time collaborator Wolfgang Pauli and several other prominent physicists, the physics community concluded that Heisenberg had gone wrong, that he was pursuing a theory whose mathematical consistency was doubtful and which, even if numerical results could unambiguously be extracted from it, could not reproduce the rich particle phenomenology of the subnuclear world.
![book cover: Alexander Blum: Heisenberg's 1948 Weltformel and the Roots of Post-Empirical Physics (2019)](/sites/default/files/styles/content_header_image/public/2019-05/blum_heisenberg_2019.jpg?itok=KNupiYYm)
Publication
Heisenberg’s 1958 Weltformel and the Roots of Post-Empirical Physics