#Helgoland2025

Original post on social.uibk.ac.at

🎧 „Helgoland – 100 Jahre Quantenphysik“

Im Juni traf sich die Weltspitze der Quantenforschung auf Helgoland – dort, wo Werner Heisenberg 1925 Grundlagen für die Quantenmechanik legte. 🧠⚛️

📍 Im Gespräch:
🔹 Tracy Northup (Uni Innsbruck)
🔹 Michelle Simmons (UNSW Sydney)
🔹 Peter Zoller (Uni […]

Still gathering my thoughts after coming back from #Helgoland2025, in a nutshell: it certainly was special. Can’t resist sharing a little sneak peak with Časlav Brukner’s priceless old “Balkan” grandma joke (but am keeping Steven Girvin’s equally entertaining “half the time” quip to myself).

And that's a wrap folks. I will try to collate all my skeets from #Helgoland2025 if I get a chance...

Final panel... Tracy Northrup, Lorenzo Maccone, Gerd Leuchs, Roman Schnabel, Peter Zoller. #Helgoland2025

Final talk! (Before the closing panel) #Helgoland2025

Next up: Nathalie de Leon #Helgoland2025

Last day of #Helgoland2025, and Rainer Blatt is telling us about this field, in which he has been a pioneer.

Here comes tonight's panel: Gerald Milburn, David Wineland, Anna Maria Rey, Christine Silberhorn, Serge Haroche. #Helgoland2025

Angelo Bassi poses an old question, which John Bell also asked. #Helgoland2025

Michel Devoret explains what went wrong. #Helgoland2025

Enjoying all the updates from #Helgoland2025

Up next... #Helgoland2025

Next up is David Moore of Yale, with whom I had a very nice chat over breakfast. #Helgoland2025

Gemma de les Coves being entirely honest from the start. #Helgoland2025

Should be an interesting start to the morning. #Helgoland2025

Tonight's panel is Liang Jiang, Birgitta Whaley, Robert Schoelkopf, Michelle Simmons and Charles Bennett. #Helgoland2025

Aram Harrow reminds us that the question of why there is (sometimes) speedup from quantum computers *has no general answer*. (But if you don't use quantum resources like entanglement, there's no speedup.) #Helgoland2025

Talk slide by Vedika Khemani

Starting the evening session at #Helgoland2025, Vedika Khemani on topological quantum spin phases.

6 persons on a green field looking into the camera.

In June 1925, Werner Heisenberg traveled to the island of #Helgoland to formulate the mathematical foundations of #quantum mechanics. 100 years later, the leaders of the field are meeting again on Helgoland this week. Physicists from Innsbruck are part of […]

[Original post on social.uibk.ac.at]

6 Personen stehen auf einer grünen Wiese und blicken in die Kamera (v.l. Peter Zoller, Thomas Agrenius-Gustafsson, Lukas Fiderer, Johannes Fankhauser und Tracy Northup.

Im Juni 1925 fuhr Werner Heisenberg auf die Insel #Helgoland, um hier das mathematische Fundament der Quantenmechanik zu formulieren. 100 Jahre später treffen sich in dieser Woche die Größen des Faches wieder auf Helgoland. Mit dabei auch Physiker aus […]

[Original post on social.uibk.ac.at]

Carlo Rovelli comes out with fighting talk, saying we *do* have a tentative theory of quantum gravity: quantum loop gravity. #Helgoland2025

Now Markus Arndt is telling us about Schrodinger's kittens. #Helgoland2025

Flaminia Giacomini: "We have no experimental evidence that we should quantize gravity". This seems clear - which is why it surprised me that some researchers I spoke to recently implied it was almost silly to suppose gravity might not be quantum. #Helgoland2025

Note that if they succeed in making gravitationally induced entanglement, that rules out all quantum theories that invoke gravitationally induced physical collapse (Penrose etc). #Helgoland2025

Here we go again. #Helgoland2025

This discussion is confirming how wrong it is to say quantum gravity is just stuck. Forget string theory; explorations of QG within quantum foundations and quantum information theory are very rich (and experiment-adjacent!). #Helgoland2025

John Preskill suggests what he thinks are the biggest ideas in physics in the past 50 years:
1. Holographic principle. (AdS/CFT)
2. Topological quantum order.
3. Quantum error correction.
And all involve highly entangled many-body systems. #Helgoland2025

Igor is very optimistic about real experiments on quantum gravity in the next 15 years or so. Stay tuned for that - I've an article in the works. #Helgoland2025

Panel session now. Bill Unruh cuts to the case: "What is a particle? A particle is what a particle detector detects." #Helgoland2025

Now he's talking about seeing gravity quantization by creating gravitational superpositions. I've got an article in the pipeline about that. #Helgoland2025