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.
Publication
Heisenberg’s 1958 Weltformel and the Roots of Post-Empirical Physics