Helgoland

Helgoland  Latest News

Physicists treat Helgoland as the birthplace of quantum theory.

About Helgoland

• Location: 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.

‹ ›

Relevance of Helgoland

• In June 1925, 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.
• This detail produced equations that matched the spectrum of hydrogen atoms perfectly. Heisenberg had thus sketched the first complete version of quantum mechanics, later called matrix mechanics.

Source: TH