The picture was taken outside the Institute of Physiology in Brussels, Belgium
It is universally celebrated as the most intelligent photograph ever taken, assembling 29 of the world’s greatest mathematical and scientific minds to debate the newly birthed, controversial theories of quantum physics.
Out of the 29 scientists present in the photograph, 17 had already won or would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics or Chemistry.
The conference, officially titled the Fifth Solvay International Conference on Electrons and Photons, was funded by the wealthy Belgian industrialist Ernest Solvay to foster high-level scientific debate.
The attendees are arranged in three iconic rows, featuring a legendary lineup of scientific pioneers:
Albert Einstein sits dead center in the front row, flanked directly by Marie Curie (the only woman in attendance and the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences) and Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz.
The middle and back rows are packed with the young titans who were actively rewriting the laws of physics, including Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Planck, Louis de Broglie, and Paul Dirac.
The central theme of the 1927 conference was a fierce, historic intellectual showdown between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr regarding the fundamental nature of reality:
The Copenhagen Interpretation by Bohr argued that the universe at a subatomic level is governed entirely by probability, uncertainty, and randomness.
Einstein’s rejected an absolute deterministic laws objeting
“God does not play dice with the universe.”
Bohr replied:
“Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”