I always found this fascinating. The enormous shift in physics that occurred in the early 20th century must have been so exciting to experience first hand.
It seems like it had a lasting psychological impact on the thinking of the generation of scientists, who lived through this radical revolution .
I found very interesting this moment in an interview with Freeman Dyson, where he describes the difference in thinking between two generations of scientists around 1950 (Oppenheimer, Bohr, Heisenberg… vs. Feynman, Schwinger…):
"they lived through this radical revolution of quantum electrodynamics, which was so successful, they wanted to have something like that again"
"each of them had radical proposals, which turned out to be totally useless and in the meantime it was the young people who actually were the conservatives"
