The world's brightest scientific minds posed for this 1927 photo after historic debates about quantum mechanics
"Each sleepless night, Bohr would worry and fume and ruminate about Einstein's attack, and then he would respond the next day with a keen rebuttal, showing where Einstein has missed something, and salvage Heisenberg's principle. This debate went on for days at that Solvay conference and continued on 3 years later at the next conference," Dowling writes in his book, Schrödinger's Killer App: Race to Build the World's First Quantum Computer.
Bohr's counterattack involved using Einstein's own theory of relativity against him - and it reportedly won the argument. Eight years later, Einstein still struggled to prove that the theory was incorrect, instead describing it as "incomplete."Here's the full group of brilliant minds:.jp2)
Front row: Irving Langmuir, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, Paul Langevin, Charles-Eugène Guye, C.T.R Wilson, Owen Richardson.
Middle row: Peter Debye, Martin Knudsen, William Lawrence Bragg, Hendrik Anthony Kramers, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Niels Bohr.
Back row: Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrödinger, JE Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Fowler, Léon Brillouin.
Curie, the only woman in attendance, was also the only one among them to win a Nobel Prize in two separate disciplines: chemistry and physics.