Many have pinpointed the birth of quantum mechanics to the small, treeless island of Helgoland, where a young Werner Heisenberg went in the summer of 1925. There, he sketched out the basics of what would become our most brilliant and successful way of explaining reality. At the heart of his approach was the decision to focus exclusively on what observers would find when they measured particles.
It was a flash of genius – but it has also tied physicists up in knots for 100 years. Much of the trouble comes down to questions about what an observer is and what exactly constitutes an observation. Are we to believe that reality is somehow contingent on us looking at it?
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