Helgoland:
Physicists treat Helgoland as the birthplace of quantum theory.Helgoland is a speck of red-sandstone cliffs lies in the German Bay (Deutsche Bucht) of the North Sea. It is barely a square kilometre in area, it was once a naval fortress. Physicists today treat Helgoland as the birthplace of quantum theory.Werner Heisenberg, 23 and tormented by hay fever in Göttingen, fled to Helgoland. He dropped the idea of electrons ‘orbiting’ an atom’s nucleus in favour of only those facts that fit experimental data: the frequencies and strengths of the light atoms absorb or emit. To keep track of those numbers, he arranged them in grids called matrices. When he multiplied the grids, the order mattered: position times momentum was not equal to momentum times position.
