The quantum revolution fundamentally changed the research agenda of the international physics community. Macroscopic classical research topics like acoustics, optics, and the electrical properties of matter were replaced by microscopic quantum topics like the study of atoms, nuclei, and elementary particles. In this talk, I discuss how a sociological perspective associated with this change of agenda has contributed to the century-long struggle of biological physics to gain acceptance as a research topic in American physics departments.

With 2025 marking the centenary of the formulation of matrix mechanics, academic and public attention to Werner Heisenberg who won the Nobel Prize in 1933 for the “creation of Quantum Mechanics.” Following the Second World War Heisenberg continuously engaged in the popularisation of modern physics by holding public lectures, publishing books, or giving interviews. The most prominent example of his popular writings is the memoir “The Part and the Whole” from 1969 and which recounts his career as a physicist in Germany. In his memoir he presents the formulation of quantum mechanics as a hyper individual experience in the middle of the night. Since then experience has become synonymous with Heisenberg’s breakthrough in the quantum mechanics.
In this paper, I show how Heisenberg experience in Helgoland mobilises the topos of the experience of nature to veil the work of many people and presents him as a “Romantic Genius.” To do so, I, firstly, trace the cultural history of the central topos (i.e., the experience of knowledge) of Heisenberg’s recount back to the reinterpretation of religion as an experience of nature. Secondly, I show how this topos reduces the work that was necessary for the formulation of quantum mechanics to a side note. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Heisenberg’s night in Helgoland promotes an aesthetic ideology which universalises the produced knowledge (i.e., quantum mechanics) and presents Heisenberg as a Romantic Genius.

The meeting patronized by the Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay in 1911, the first Solvay Council in Brussels, marked the beginning of what can be called the first quantum revolution. This process came to a closure in 1927 with the fifth Solvay meeting, which, according to Werner Heisenberg: “was where the details were really discussed and where one had to fight.” The sixteen years necessary to achieve the conceptual leap from classical to quantum physics (1911-1927) coincide with the period during which the Scientific Committee of the International Solvay Institute of Physics was placed under the enlightened chairmanship of Hendrik A. Lorentz. The Brussels meetings were only part of a broader design envisioned by the Belgian philanthropist. The project, implemented by Lorentz, comprised three different directions of action for the International Solvay Institutes: establish a bursary program for young Belgian scholars, grant subsidies to experimental physicists from all nations, and promote the exchange of ideas between the most competent researchers through the regular organization of Physics Councils by the International Scientific Committee. We present some case studies connected with these three actions and show that they had a concrete impact on the creation and completion of the new quantum mechanics. The Great War forced us to divide the analyzed period into two parts. For the early years of the Solvay Institutes, we focus on an understudied topic, the subsidies granted by Lorentz and Scientific Committee, and for the post-war period, we highlight the contribution of the Solvay meetings.