The Solvay Conference on quantum mechanics is held every three years and is devoted to outstanding preeminent open problems in both physics and chemistry. The 1927 conference (attendees shown here) had seventeen Nobel Prize winners, and was the beginning of the Bohr-Einstein debates, wherein Albert Einstein challenged the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Other familiar names include Planck, Curie, Schrödinger, Pauli, Heisenberg, Lorentz, Dirac, Compton, de Broglie, Debye, and Bragg. Photo credit: Benjamin Couprie |