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How did you celebrate this summer’s centennial of Werner Heisenberg’s “magical paper,” which eventually brought us computers and smartphones?

You say your social calendar doesn’t revolve around physics? Fair enough. Heisenberg’s magical paper helped to show that electrons don’t revolve around atomic nuclei, either, but the story of how the paper came about may inspire us to claim money we’re due and to celebrate an equally important bicentennial next year — one with Albany at its center.

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In the summer of 1925, Heisenberg had just completed several months of working for the great Danish physicist Neils Bohr, who had come up with a famous model of atoms, in which electrons orbited the nuclei, much as planets orbit the sun, making our world on very small scales almost as easy to understand as the large-scale structure of our solar system. This was a beautiful idea that accounted for some aspects of atomic behavior but not all of them, making the idea either incomplete or wrong.

Meanwhile, Heisenberg was suffering from hay fever. To escape the pollen, he went on vacation to Heligoland, which is pretty much what it sounds like, a remote archipelago in the North Sea.

That’s the story.........

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