One hundred years to the month had passed since a 23-year-old postdoc named Werner Heisenberg was driven by a case of hay fever to Helgoland, a barren, windswept island in the North Sea. There, Heisenberg completed a calculation that would become the heart of quantum mechanics, a radical new theory of the atomic and subatomic world.

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The morning after the banquet in Hamburg, the gathered physicists (and a handful of journalists) traveled by ferry to Helgoland to discuss where things stand a century after the theory’s birth.