I've just returned from Heligoland from a conference called "Helgoland 2025" (doh!) to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Werner Heisenberg writing up a first formalism relevant to quantum theory.
Here is a memorial slab definitely not put up where Heisenberg climbed a cliff in the early morning after his epiphany: for one thing it is quite more accessible to the public (not that quantum theory is known to be particularly accessible either), for another, "same place" is hard to establish since the RAF was done with blowing up the island.
I actually went all around the island before discovering this one, so I had to revert to an off-camera flash to make the writing visible.
This was the conference center:
My father was late in writing up work for the conference and did his best to convince the chair to admit a talk but without success. The chair quite rightly said that lots of people would want a slot without having been accepted in the process. In the end, this ended up a bit of guerilla physics: with the help of the local tourist bureau, my father was able to to hijack a congregation room after a talk of the island cantor (proposing for UN status as a combined climate and war memorial site). The cantor had put up about 8 chairs which probably had to grow to over 30 to accommodate the people there who were actually absconding from the conference they had paid for.
And that conference was not really trivial (there were about 4 Nobel prize laureates among the speakers and attendants).
Of inestimable help and energy was a physics friend (also retired but about 15 years younger than my father) who organized most of the stuff and advertised it.
Here are a few pictures from the talk:
The laser pointer did not really work on the polished flat glass screen, being only visible to a select few, so my father (to the left) was aided by his colleague who had snatched my father's walking stick and used it as a pointer to the slides.
Part of the audience
Question time
He definitely managed to get some traction here. The poster session (the thing the conference chair was willing to support, helping by putting up the slide printouts as a poster and arranging a prominent place) was overlapping with the talk, and the second half of the poster session was definitely less effective in attracting competent audience:
Not all of the participants in the talk appeared to be motivated by the material itself but possibly were more there as "groupies" to witness a 90+ year old still doing important theoretical physics work. The session also attracted a few people with professional recording equipment, so there may be some anecdotal coverage of it in the context in the conference reporting: it was, through speaker and organisational effort, a demonstration of love for science that was, in itself, quite appealing.
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Dak
