Animation pioneer Walt Disney and nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg are born. If you’ve ever thought the uncertainty principle sounded goofy, you may be onto something.
Disney was born in Chicago. His animation innovations included the first sound-synch cartoon, Steamboat Willie, Mickey Mouse’s 1928 debut. Flowers and Trees, the first full-color animated cartoon, won Disney the first of his thirty-two Academy Awards. The Old Mill (1937) was the first short to use the multiplane camera technique, with foreground, midground, and background on separate animation cels at different distances from the camera.
Fantasia (1940) combined live action with animation. Disney introduced time-lapse film photography to a wide public with films like The Living Desert. Southern California’s Disneyland started the shift in 1955 from generic amusement parks to theme parks and included a futuristic sci-fi Tomorrowland. Disney conceived Florida’s EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, as a showcase for technology that improves people’s lives.
Heisenberg was born in Würzburg, Germany. Working in Copenhagen under Niels Bohr, he described a method for calculating the energy levels of “atomic oscillators” in a 1925 paper, “On Quantum Mechanical Interpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations.” It brought him immediate fame.
A second paper explained his famous uncertainty principle, which states that it’s impossible to specify both the exact position and the exact momentum of a subatomic particle at the same time. Heisenberg received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932, the same year Disney won his first Oscar.
During World War II, while Disney was making military-training and civilian-propaganda films for the U.S., Heisenberg was director of Germany’s uranium project, working on an atomic bomb. He was arrested in April 1945 and remained imprisoned in England until 1946. Heisenberg died in 1976, nine years after Disney.—RA