Magazine

One hundred years ago, Werner Heisenberg retreated to the island of Helgoland, where he built the foundations of the first full formulation of quantum mechanics. A century has not sufficed to fully understand or exploit the theory – and high-energy physicists today find themselves at an interesting juncture. Detector designs are beginning to push quantum limits (p31). Quantum computing is in its “noisy intermediate-scale” era, poised to apply its remarkable parallelism to simulations beyond the reach of classical supercomputers (p35). And increasing numbers of theorists are grappling with the foundational assumptions of the theory. In this anniversary edition, Carlo Rovelli (p21) and David Wallace (p26) explore a jungle of ideas to resolve questions that have defied consensus since the earliest days of quantum mechanics.