Grove Koger

The tiny German island of Heligoland is where physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) began to develop his revolutionary theory of quantum mechanics. As he recounted in Der Teil und das Ganze: Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik (1969), he reached the island in June 1925. He had, he said, been encouraged by fellow physicist Niels Bohr, who had remarked that a grasp of infinity was available only to those “who look across the sea.”

Heisenberg suffered from hay fever, and as Heligoland had (and continues to have) very few flowering plants growing on it, he took Bohr’s advice.

That “look across the sea” apparently worked. “It was almost three o’clock in the morning before the final result of my computations lay before me,” Heisenberg later wrote. “The energy principle had held for all the terms, and I could no longer doubt the mathematical consistency and coherence of the kind of quantum mechanics to which my calculations pointed. At first I was deeply alarmed.… I was far too excited to sleep, and so, as a new day dawned, I made for the southern tip of the island, where I had been longing to climb a rock jutting out into the sea. I now did so without too much trouble, and waited for the sun to rise.”

Or so the story goes, at least according to Heisenberg himself. In his history Heligoland: Britain, Germany and the Struggle for the North Sea (Oxford UP, 2017), Jan Rüger has some doubts, and I think we can agree that it may be just too good a story. But as a character in the 1962 John Ford film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance remarks, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” And Heisenberg’s account of the genesis of his theory is as good a legend as any.

As you may know, the uncertainty principle, also known as Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, is fundamental to the concept of quantum mechanics. Heisenberg introduced the principle specifically in an article in the March 1927 issue of Zeitschrift für Physik, a translation of which has since been translated as a NASA Technical Memorandum, “The Actual Content of Quantum Theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics,” in December 1983.

As the ever-helpful Wikipedia puts it, the principle “states that there is a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known. In other words, the more accurately one property is measured, the less accurately the other property can be known.”

Personally speaking, I’m delighted to learn that there might be some uncertainty regarding the genesis of the uncertainty principle. Every six months or so, I vow to myself to come to an understanding of quantum mechanics itself—a vow that seldom lasts more than 45 frustrating minutes. However, Maggie and I have reservations on Florida’s Saint George Island in May 2026, and that may be my opportunity to “look across the sea.”

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