A Quantum of Solace
- Bahar Gholipour
- Dec 21, 2025
- 9 min read
Updated: Dec 21, 2025
A Bunch of Us Visited 1925 to Figure Out 2025
The North Sea was behind me, its gusts threatening to knock me off my perch. Matt gripped my ankle, steadying me on the slick metal of the electrical panel box. Precarious, but these few extra feet of height made all the difference for this once-in-a-century shot. And I had a decision to make on the spot.
Before me, 300 quantum physicists clustered on an embankment in a formation as fragile as my footing. Their sheer numbers and inclination to tangential thinking made it feel like herding a clowder of Schrödinger’s cats. But fortunately physicists are famously reliable when it comes to conference photos—what if this one becomes the next Solvay photo, that iconic 1927 snap of Curie, Einstein, Bohr and other titans of the golden age of physics? And this conference carried historical weight of its own: we were on the remote island where, exactly one hundred years ago in 1925, a young Werner Heisenberg spent ten strange days and left with a discovery that launched quantum physics — the revolutionary science to which we owe both our modern technological world and the shattering of our confidence that reality is either intuitive or knowable.
After several minutes of Matt shouting geometric transformations, the physicists drifted in near-Brownian motion into the camera frame, a meta-stable configuration that could collapse at any moment. Their eyes squinting in the bright sun, they stared up at me expectantly.
Now, what these folks didn’t know was that I was not a photographer. Nor a physicist. I wasn't even supposed to know about this unadvertised event, much less find myself with the momentary command of hundreds of the world’s sharpest minds, with four Nobel laureates in the front row alone. I wanted nothing more than to take the photo, climb down to firm ground and disappear. But I had a camera, a captive audience, and a story to tell. The confluence of events that had placed me there was so bonkers I actually worried I’d be disrupting the plot (and inviting the wrath) of a supernatural playwright if I kept quiet.
“Don’t die!” a voice from the crowd yelled out as gusts picked up. Physicists are, on the whole, a decent lot. I braced into a firmer stand and hoped that a boost from the wind would carry my voice to the crowd. Matt gripped tighter and I went for it: “While I have you here, let me tell you a little story…”
In 1969, almost half a century after his fateful stay on Helgoland, Heisenberg wrote a book titled: Der Teil und das Ganze. Straight to English it would be: The Part and the Whole. But the English print carried a vague alternative: Physics and Beyond, which may have played a role in sentencing Heisenberg's most personal account of quantum mechanics' early years to relative obscurity.
Similarly obscure are the reasons why an engineering professor in Tehran in the 1980s decided that book needed to be translated into Farsi. But he did.
And in the 1990s, a high school teacher handed that Farsi translation to six teenage girls in their extracurricular physics class. It was an instant hit. They read it with the strange affinity that sometimes forms between adolescent minds: here was another teenager, across time and geography, equally dramatic and earnest, worrying about such grand questions as the nature of existence and such details as what Plato exactly meant with those ideal triangles. For them, Werner was less the founder of quantum mechanics and more a kind of European Holden Caulfield, only with better philosophical musings.
Over the ensuing couple of decades most of those girls scattered to different corners of the world, became engineers and scientists of all kinds. In 2024, one of them passed by the office of Anton Zeilinger, a leading quantum physicist renowned for his experiments on quantum entanglement and teleportation. It was after hours and his office was closed, but he wasn’t who I was looking for anyway.
I had wandered into the Mathematics Department at the University of Vienna, roaming the empty hallways in search of the ground zero of the Vienna Circle, the lecture hall where a group of philosophers and scientists had once sat together and tried to reinvent knowledge from the ground up. It was a quick stop in my town hopping in Europe—ostensibly to visit old friends but also to process what felt like an unraveling back home in America. History holds many moments when sociopolitical shifts stop feeling like mere fluctuations and start feeling like reversals. Having grown up during one myself, I was pretty smug, until I wasn’t. Now like a child looking for her mother, I was looking for someone, for anyone, who had been through something like this.
In their heyday, the Vienna Circle members must have felt they stood at the brink of a new era of enlightenment. The (first) world war was already a few years in the past, and transformative leaps in science and philosophy (by Einstein, Russell, Hilbert,...) had swelled imaginations with what was possible. The urge to dig even deeper for the ground truth of all things was stronger than ever. I imagined the Vienna Circle in those early years: brilliant, hopeful, idealistic — working on reconstructing a new foundation for all knowledge, one that was deeply rooted in sound reasoning and logic, with no room for unfounded assumptions. Many of them saw in such a worldview not just a fortification of the scientific method and a revamping of philosophy but also the potential to reform society. “The scientific worldview serves life, and life embraces it,” they wrote in a 1929 manifesto, and they were dedicated to spreading it.
But the world had other plans. Their era was one of intense economic and political turmoil in Austria and Germany. What I wanted to know was how they felt in those in-between-wars years. As the smoke around them intensified, how did they grapple with the dissonance between their lofty intellectual ambitions and a world that seemed not to care? How did it feel to keep carrying on?
I don’t know what made me think I could possibly find answers in an empty math department in Vienna. But now, having come upon Zeilinger’s office, I thought it’d be funny to take a selfie by the office door of someone who had just gotten the Nobel for experiments proving that quantum mechanics is, after all, at least as weird as we feared. Suddenly, out of the clutter of posters and announcements pinned nearby, one word struck me: Helgoland.
I was shot back in time. At first back two decades to a classroom in Tehran, dog-eared copy of Der Teil und das Ganze in hand, and then back a century to the story therein: a kid just like us, obsessed with mysteries (currently of the atom and the orbits used to explain the motion of electrons); his journey to Helgoland seeking refuge from allergies (and his mentors); the simple purity of his curiosity and his unwavering resolve to let go of any preconception about the nature of the subatomic world; and how it felt when one night at 3am, his first quantum calculations held true:
“At first I was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that, through the surface of atomic phenomena, I was looking at a strangely beautiful interior, and felt almost giddy at the thought that I now had to probe this wealth of mathematical structures nature had so generously spread out before me.”
I had come looking for ghosts. I had found one that I hadn’t expected.
Helgoland 2025 Centenary Conference on Quantum Foundations.
The poster announced a conference to be held on the very island of Heisenberg’s epiphany—and on its precise centenary. I had a year to make it happen. But in the chaos of a film project, I failed to even ask for a journalist invitation in time. Begging didn’t help. Holding an event of this scale on such a tiny island was a logistical nightmare, and capacity was strictly limited. The final “sorry, no” came from a lead organizer who added (with, I think, an implied wink): You could always just come to the island yourselves. Such a great idea. The only thing better than an invitation to a quantum conference is an opportunity to crash one.
So here I was, brought to a remote island by a chain of improbable events, and via a three-hour ferry ride that often cancels due to rough seas—and ours nearly did. But the journey was deemed safe on the morning of, though rough enough to make numerous physicists hold their churning stomachs while others argued the exact number of years of setback to the field if the ship went down.
From getting safely to the shore to getting on top of an electrical box a few days later, it still took another set of events of an almost conspiratorial nature. It turns out, for all their brilliance, quantum physicists can forget to arrange photography for a historic event five years in the making. The day was almost saved by the unlikely appearance of a talented drone cinematographer on an island of 1,200 people, but that plan also fell apart when his drone was struck down mid-flight by the island’s oddly territorial seabirds. The next day, Sebastian—still crushed that his brilliant discovery of Jakob the drone pilot had failed—noticed the camera around my neck. And thus, I became the official last resort.
“... and that’s how you find yourself in the improbable position of having your photograph taken by an ex-neuroscientist turned photographer for the day.” The quantum physicists got a highly abbreviated version of this story, a listicle of the fixed points in time. Enough for them to fill in the gaps, enough for them to imagine their own improbable arcs weaving outward from Heisenberg and back to the same place 100 years later. But not so much that they dared budge from our hard-won framing. I snapped the pic. Everyone was smiling.
After the photo we scurried to the Helgoland cliffs to film an interview with Carlo Rovelli. We passed the site of Heisenberg’s 3am epiphany—or at least the house that now stood in the spot. The town of 1925 had been completely leveled in World War II, being the last point for British bombers to dump their deadly load before heading home. After the war, more leftover munitions (like, all of them) were stuffed into the sprawling tunnels of the Nazi U-boat base beneath the southern tip of the island. That entire region is now a crater created by the largest non-nuclear explosion in history. Overlooking the crater, atop a hill, is a memorial stone for Heisenberg.
When we all arrived at the meeting point, Carlo asked me about rising Iran-Israel tensions. “Oh, that?” I said, in that mindless manner of someone towards a question they’ve been asked a thousand times before. “It happens every other week.” Jakob, our Helgoland-born drone cinematographer, chipped in with something about the Pentagon Pizza Tracker, which should have been my clue, had I actually understood it. That night Israel started bombing Tehran. Mere hours earlier I was excitedly emailing anyone I thought could help track down the professor who had translated Heisenberg’s book into Farsi. I wanted to share the photo and tell him what he had set in motion. Now, I just hoped he was safe.
In 1936, Moritz Schlick, the Vienna Circle’s last remaining co-founder, was shot dead on the steps of the university for his anti-authoritarian philosophies and for being Jewish. That was the last straw for the already nervous Circle. Its members dispersed, and eventually most fled Austria.
Why try to rebuild all knowledge? Why solve the atom? Why translate Der Teil und das Ganze to Farsi? When the bombs are coming, how does it not feel silly, how does it feel remotely relevant to be talking about logic and the nature of truth?
The answer hit me as soon as I met a friend in Lugano, my next and final stop after Vienna, and realized I’m recounting my soul-searching journey using words I owe to the Vienna Circle. It was so obvious I felt silly for even ever asking. Truth and verifiability? Evidence-based science and medicine? The formal logic that underlies the computers and algorithms we use everyday, and the logical principles that now guide our reasoning? And I’m sitting here in my friend’s car literally 100 years after the first meetings of a bunch of hopeful philosophers and scientists, and I'm asking how was it all…relevant?
The Vienna circle was “a shining pinnacle of exact thinking, set against a backdrop of wild fanaticism and maniacal stupidity,” Karl Sigmund writes in “Exact Thinking in Demented Times,” (another book that found its way to me in a kismetic sleight of hand on a curb on 13th street in the East Village). “Our valiant philosophers were well aware of standing on the perilously listing deck of a sinking ship, but this only lent greater urgency to their discussions…There seemed to be little time left.”
In the lake-filled valley of Lugano, it was hard to even imagine the inhuman scale of the surrounding mountain range. I don’t know how hard it might have felt to insist on taking the long view of history from the inside of the dark temporal valley of wartime Europe. The grand arc of time feels like an abstraction, and none of us survive to see it play out. But ideas do. We think differently today, entirely differently, because a group of people dared to think differently then. Ideas seem to travel differently in the manifold of spacetime than we do in the flesh. Less linearly and more quantum like. They tunnel.
Thanks to the power of (digital) superposition, the Helgoland 2025 conference photo came out great, all things considered. Everyone managed to not blink in at least one of the several snaps, though never all in the same one. That luxury was not afforded to the Solvay photographer. Wolfgang Pauli was the unlucky blinker in that case, although maybe Einstein, Lorentz, Planck, or Curie blinked in other prints and Pauli had to be sacrificed. Next to Pauli is Heisenberg, third from the right in the last row. He is the only one decidedly smiling, quite boyishly and excited. His hair looks windswept, as though he never left the island. He doesn't know what's coming, but he thrills at the promise of the moment he is in.
