Heisenberg Saw God?

Heisenberg thought quantum theory is a connection with truth and, as such, a closeness to God. Was he right?

I like Werner Heisenberg’s take on Plato and mathematics, but I cannot follow him all the way. Is the world of God a departure from our senses?

Plato’s Solids

In his 1962 book, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science, Heisenberg reviews the roots of quantum theory reaching back to ancient Greece (Chapter IV). More than any other, he is enthusiastic about Plato’s Timaeus. Usually in this context of all-things-atoms, we hear about Democritus, who coined the term. But Plato was not an atomist after Democritus. He rejected that eternal and indivisible particles account for nature’s changing phenomena and apparently even wanted to burn all Democritus’s writings (Laërtius, IX, 393). Plato also did not agree with Pythagoras that mathematics was directly connected to religion (i.e., worship of Dionysus). Plato synthesized his own teaching from those of his predecessors. To Democritus’s idea of atoms and Pythagoras’s mathematics, Plato expanded the idea of elements from Empedocl…