@maxplanckgesellschaft @MPI_ScienceOfLight In his memoirs, #Heisenberg writes that he was staying in a pension in the 'Oberland', the part of the island up the steep cliff. Since there was not much distraction except the walks around the island and going for a swim on the nearby smaller island, he writes he was able to make much more rapid progress than what would have been possible in Göttingen. After a few days he had drastically simplified the mathematics and after a few more days he had found the central ansatz in his equations. But then he realized that now all freedom in the formulation of the theory was gone, and he started to worry whether something as elementary as energy conservation would be fulfilled or whether his theory would turn out to be contradictory in itself. He sat down to check energy conservation term by term (presumably: using perturbation theory?, since his prime example was the anharmonic oscillator). As the terms got more complicated, he made many mistakes and it took him until three in the night to finish his calculations. It was then that he had convinced himself that energy was conserved. This made him realize that his theory was apparently correct and he was 'scared' (erschrocken) on seeing this and recognizing there would now be a whole world of mathematical structures to be discovered. At that point he left the house and, he writes, climbed up a rock at the island's southern end to await the sunrise.

@kleinerJedi @Sendekomplex Über diese Variante hat #Heisenberg sogar ein ganzes Buch geschrieben ... 🤡