The calendar has a way of combining unlikely people on the same date, a quirk this series loves to uncover…and there might be no odder pairing than today’s. It was 113 years ago that the 20th century met two people who went on to fame along very different paths, when Walt Disney and Werner Heisenberg both entered the world on December 5, 1901.

After beginning life in Chicago, Disney’s path was marked with bright and colorful milestones. He pioneered the use of sound and color in animation before expanding the cartoon to a feature length art form in the 1920s and 1930s, then applied his cinematic tricks to three-dimensional space by more or less inventing the modern theme park when Disneyland opened in 1955. By the end of his life in the mid-1960s, he was dabbling in the realm of science fiction and trying to make it reality with his work on an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, a futuristic planned city he called E.P.C.O.T.

For the German Heisenberg, bringing science fiction into the real world was just a day at the office. His work in theoretical physics saw him blaze trails into the freaky new world of quantum mechanics. He’s best known for his game-changing Uncertainty Principle, which he established in a 1927 paper. Heisenberg upended the existing scientific model with his principle, which said that in the subatomic realm, you could never know with certainty both the position and momentum of a particle. This view shattered the existing paradigm of a deterministic universe held by classical scientists like Isaac Newton, who believed it was theoretically possible to know everything about the past and future of a thing by gaining access to 100% of the information about it now. Quantum mechanics throws the universe into chaos by declaring it is impossible, mathematically, to know everything about a particle in the present moment.

There don’t appear to be many parallels between Disney and Heisenberg. They worked in different fields toward different outcomes. But for both of them, 1932 was a year of accomplishment and praise, as they both won major awards in their fields. Disney was given his first Academy Award that year, an honorary statue praising him for his work creating Mickey Mouse. He went on to win 26 Oscars, four of them honorary. The same year, Heisenberg took the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the creation of quantum mechanics (although the award wasn’t announced until 1933).

Both men also worked for their respective countries during World War II. Disney tasked his animators with churning out military training films and propaganda pieces, including a memorable 1943 cartoon that placed Donald Duck in the service of Hitler. Heisenberg found himself in the actual service of the Third Reich, although he doesn’t appear to have been a true Nazi sympathizer. He worked with other German scientists on developing an atomic bomb and was almost assassinated by an American spy during a lecture, who never drew his gun because Heisenberg never said the German scientists were close to finishing the bomb. Heisenberg was arrested by the British after the war, and returned to his scientific work after re-settling in postwar Germany. Disney died in 1966, and Heisenberg followed in 1976…leaving the 20th century both more colorful, and more uncertain, than it had been before they got to it.

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