On a walk together in 1926, a venerated older scientist pressed the younger Heisenberg on the weakness he saw disqualifying his approach—that he was jettisoning our long-held belief in the independence of reality from our observations of it. Heisenberg pushed back. Had not the renowned professor himself come up with his own epochal discovery by overturning our most basic assumptions about time and space? “Possibly I did,” Albert Einstein grudgingly conceded, “but it is nonsense all the same.”[23]
