Hundreds of physicists (and a few journalists) journeyed to Helgoland, the birthplace of quantum mechanics, and grappled with what they have and haven’t learned about reality.

“Happy 100th birthday, quantum mechanics!” a physicist bellowed into a microphone one evening in June, and the cavernous banquet hall of Hamburg’s Hotel Atlantic erupted into cheers and applause. Some 300 quantum physicists had traveled from around the world to attend the opening reception of a six-day conference marking the centennial of the most successful theory in physics. The crowd included well-known pioneers of quantum computing and quantum cryptography, and four Nobel Prize winners.

“I feel like I’m at Woodstock,” Daniel Burgarth(opens a new tab) of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany told me. “It’s my only chance to see them all in one place.”

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.

The theory remains radical.

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