Heisenberg's platonism

W. Heisenberg was one of the great physicists of the 20th century, and helped shape modern quantum mechanics. Around two thousand years after Plato and Aristotle, and even before the more recent developments of mathematical physics such as string theory, a leader of modern science has this to say:

I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.