In the summer of 1925, the young physicist Werner Heisenberg suffered terribly from hay fever. For respite, he holed up on the island of Helgoland – Heligoland on the weather map – off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein in the North Sea. It had sparse vegetation, so minimal pollen. On around the night of 7th June, after hours of toil, he came up with the equation which was to change science and continues to shake our world today. The equation related to the behaviour of electrons moving from one atom to another – this is the much misunderstood ‘quantum leap’. The electrons are in quanta – grains – and the pattern of behaviour was different in relation to the atoms they left, and the atoms they were joining. Heisenberg framed the equation in two sets of tables. As he waited for the sun to come up, he recalls, “looking into a strangely beautiful interior.”