Perhaps the most remarkable gathering of minds in history, the Solvay Conference of 1927 became the battleground over the future of quantum physics. This is the story of what happened.
Since 1911, there’s been a conference held every three years in Brussels called the Solvay Conference where some of the greatest minds in the world come together to discuss and debate a specific question in science. There’s one this year, actually.
But there was one conference that stands out above the rest. It was the fifth conference, held in 1927, where this picture was taken. It’s been called the smartest photo ever taken because amongst the 29 attendees of this conference were some of the most brilliant human beings who had ever lived, including 17 Nobel Prize winners.
Legendary minds who have reshaped how we view our world. Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, Erwin Shroedinger, Marie Curie… Who, by the way, was both the only woman at the conference, and… The only person there to have won 2 Nobel prizes in 2 different scientific disciplines. So eat that humble pie dudes.
But what made this conference so historic wasn’t just the average IQ of the attendees, it was the fact that science had only recently reached into the strange new world of quantum physics… And they did not like what they found. Particles vanishing into thin air, seemingly in two places at once, weird entanglements that defy all logic, every new discovery seemed to fly in the face of hundreds of years of established physics.
And there was no consensus on why. In fact, forget consensus. There were all-out brawls. So the prevailing theories picked a side. Pilot wave theory argued it was a particle but struggled to explain its wave-like tendencies, and wave mechanics explained the waviness but had to jump through hoops to explain the particalness…
And then… There was Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle which split the difference and argued that nope… It’s both. SCANDAL! This was too much for some of these classical physicists to take, but perhaps nobody hated the implications of the uncertainty principle more than Albert Einstein. He argued endlessly throughout this conference against quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle, every single day brining new arguments to bear.
Another person who struggled with these interpretations was the famed Ervin Schrodinger, who created the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment. Which is, of course, absurd, but it’s meant to be absurd, it’s another example of the rhetorical device reductio ad absurdum which we talked about in the Zeno’s Paradox video last week.
But it does ask the big question which is, where does probability end and reality begin? In more recent years, pilot wave theory was given new life by David Bohm in the 50s, and some experiments just in the last 10 years have given it a little more credibility. But still, the uncertainty principle has held strong as the most solid theory surrounding the quantum world, even as it makes us ask fundamental questions about the nature of reality.