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Physics World

Heisenberg | not ⟩ in Helgoland

Kevlin Henney

Published Aug 1, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

In a dark corner of a guest house in Helgoland, a diary by Werner Heisenberg has been discovered, describing how he developed quantum mechanics on the island 100 years ago. But in an even stranger twist of events, a second diary – perhaps from an alternate reality where he never made it to the island – has seemingly been unearthed in his lab at the University of Göttingen. Kevlin Henney presents edited extracts from the imagined notebooks.

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/38/08/29

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In a dark corner of a guest house in Helgoland, a diary by Werner Heisenberg has been discovered, describing how he developed quantum mechanics on the island 100 years ago. But in an even stranger twist of events, a second diary – perhaps from an alternate reality where he never made it to the island – has seemingly been unearthed in his lab at the University of Göttingen. Kevlin Henney presents edited extracts from the imagined notebooks.
Heisenberg in Göttingen, Copenhagen and Helgoland Werner Heisenberg studied under Sommerfeld in Munich and was present at the Bohr Festspiele held in Göttingen in 1922 (Sect. 8.2). Although aged only 20, he challenged Bohr's support of Kramers' analysis of the quadratic Stark effect, having studied the paper in detail for Sommerfeld's seminar in Munich. The result was a long walk with Bohr during which they discussed this topic and the more general problems of quantum physics. This encounter made a strong impression on Heisenberg. Much later Heisenberg stated: ‘That discussion, which took us back and forth over Hainberg's wooded heights, was the first thorough discussion I can remember on the fundamental physical and philosophical problems of modern atomic theory, and it has certainly had a decisive influence on my later career. For the first time, I understood that Bohr's view of his theory was much more sceptical than that of many other physicists – for example, Sommerfeld – at that time, and that his insight into the structure of the theory was not a result of mathematical analysis of the basic assumptions, but rather of an intense occupation with the actual phenomena, such that it was possible for him to sense the relationships intuitively rather than derive them formally.’ Heisenberg spent the winter of 1922–1923 working in Göttingen as Born's assistant. The astronomers had made great progress in the use of perturbations techniques within the action–angle formulation of classical dynamics to study the gravitational perturbations of planetary orbits.
Quantum mechanics gives probabilistic predictions, it is very abstract, and leads to paradoxes. It was discovered in 1925 in two acts of ingenious creativity. By Heisenberg, at the Helgoland island, and by Schrödinger half a year later in Alps. It allows to explain and predict an enormous range of phenomena, but almost immediately met an opposition. Einstein fully recognized it as a practical tool, but criticized its non-deterministic nature. The Einstein-Bohr debate began. Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger ended it.
Werner Heisenberg, co-discoverer of quantum mechanics, was born on December 5, 1901, in Würzburg, Germany, the second son in a scholarly family. His father, August Heisenberg, initially taught at a gymnasium but after his Habilitation was appointed Professor of Greek Philology at the University of Munich in 1911. Werner’s teachers in Munich made observations about the 10-year-old which seem prescient today (but which probably characterize bright children everywhere): “He has an eye for what is essential and never gets lost in details…great interest and thoroughness, and ambition.” Heisenberg excelled over the other boys at skiing and chess. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
In June 1925 Heisenberg arrived at Helgoland/Heligoland island to escape a fit of hay fever. He returned with a sketch of a strange theory of the micro-world, which we now call quantum mechanics. This essay attempts to present a look at this theory, which tries to return to the original insight of Heisenberg on what should be the essence of a theory of atomic realm: it must be a theory of the observable events, in which fundamentally unobservable quantities have no place. No ontological status is given to elements of the mathematical formulation of the theory. The theory is about our description of events in laboratories, probabilities of which are given by the Born rule. Following Bohr, these events involve macroscopic measuring apparatuses, and the accessible final events are classically describable. Information about the events is cloneable, as it is of a classical nature. The modern quantum theory of classicality is the decoherence theory. It treats "the pointer variable" of measuring apparatus as an open system interacting with an environment consisting of all other "zillions" of degrees of freedom of the device, and anything coupled to it. Because such environment is uncontrollable we have no possibility to reverse measurements. The quantum mechanical measurement theory based on decoherence theory is reproducing the predictions of Born rule. Notwithstanding, possibility of reversing measurements and of application of Born rule in situations other than these which lead to macroscopically observable events are features of a modification of quantum mechanics which is called by its adherents "unitary quantum mechanics". As its predictions, which go beyond quantum mechanics, are not testable - we claim that unitary quantum mechanics in an interpretation of quantum mechanics. As such it is metaphysics.