It gives us lasers and computer chips, and it explains the bonds that build atoms into the fabric of the world and the forces that power the sun. Heisenberg completed the first step of the work in the island of Helgoland 100 years ago, and despite a century of dazzling achievements the underlying meaning is still unresolved today.

The story starts with something familiar – heating an object and observing the heat from it. To make the calculations fit, Max Planck suggested that radiation – till then thought of as waves – comes in tiny units; he called them ‘quanta’. The outcome was the groundwork for the whole of modern physics, as Prof. James Millen of King’s College London explains.

Helgoland is about the same size as Graemsay, but with around 1,300 people and ten of thousands of cruise ship visitors in the summer. It is made of red sandstone – not seen elsewhere on the continental coast, but familiar in Orkney. The process of erosion which produced the Old Man of Hoy has given Helgoland Lange Anna (‘Tall Anna’) at around one-third of the height. The island’s windswept location, with few trees and little pollen, made it ideal for Heisenberg amidst a bout of hay fever. Several visiting speakers are joining us this year to look forward into the second century of quantum theory and see how it may lead us Beyond Helgoland.