“Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seems to us in these atomic experiments?”
— Werner Heisenberg, theoretical physicist
By the end of the 19th century, science was leaping about in a self-congratulatory dance. Electricity and magnestism had been conquered; inventions like radio and telephone had arrived; Newton's laws, summing up the behavior of objects, were allowing mankind to accurately predict a solar eclipse 1000 years into the future. As far as Lord Kelvin was concerned, physics was done. There was nothing new to be explored.
