India, April 4 -- Late one summer morning in 1919, a young student at the University of Munich sat on the roof of its Training College with a copy of Plato's Timaeus.

The short but bloody reign of the Bavarian Soviet Republic had just ended, and the city was limping back to normalcy. The 17-year-old, whose name was Werner Karl Heisenberg, was reading Plato's ideas about the smallest units of matter: the Greek philosopher had thought all matter was made up of tiny right-angled triangles, which combined to form more complex shapes. This seemed like utter nonsense by the 20th century, but the idea that the smallest units of nature could be reduced to mathematical forms gripped the young Heisenberg.

At this time, physics was the thrilling s...