A colourized version (by Sanna Dullaway) of this famous photo taken with many scientists gathered together at the Solvay Conference in 1927.
Perhaps the most famous conference was the fifth Solvay Conference on Physics; held from 24 to 29 October 1927, the subject was Electrons and Photons, and the world’s most notable physicists met to discuss the newly formulated quantum theory. The leading figures were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Seventeen of the 29 attendees were or became Nobel Prize winners, including Marie Curie who, alone among them, had won Nobel Prizes in two separate scientific disciplines. Attendees Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and Erwin Schrödinger would be listed among the top ten greatest physicists of all-time, in a 1999 poll of leading physicists for Physics World magazine.
[Read more on the Solvay Conference on Wikipedia]
Following the legendary 1911 Conseil Solvay on “Radiation and the Quanta” chaired by Nobel Laureate Hendrik Lorentz, the International Solvay Institute for Physics was founded by Ernest Solvay in 1912. The International Solvay Institute for Chemistry was founded a year later, in 1913. The two Institutes merged in 1963 and became in 1970 the “International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry, founded by Ernest Solvay” with the Belgian legal status of an “Association sans but lucratif – Vereniging zonder winstoogmerk”.
[Read more on the International Solvay Institutes website]