Top 64 Werner Heisenberg Quotes
#1. The Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.
Werner Heisenberg
#2. The structure underlying the phenomena is not given by material objects like the atoms of Democritus but by the form that determines the material objects. The Ideas are more fundamental than the objects.
Werner Heisenberg
#3. I would like to mention astrophysics; in this field, the strange properties of the pulsars and quasars, and perhaps also the gravitational waves, can be considered as a challenge.
Werner Heisenberg
#4. Can quantum mechanics represent the fact that an electron finds itself approximately in a given place and that it moves approximately with a given velocity, and can we make these approximations so close that they do not cause experimental difficulties?
Werner Heisenberg
#5. In America, it was decided to attempt the production of atomic bombs with an effort that would constitute a large part of the collective American war effort. In Germany, an effort one thousandth the scale of the American was applied to the problem of producing atomic energy that would drive engines.
Werner Heisenberg
#7. Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.
Werner Heisenberg
#8. Thus, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely.
Werner Heisenberg
#9. In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas- and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed.
Werner Heisenberg
#11. It was about three o'clock at night when the final result of the calculation [which gave birth to quantum mechanics] lay before me ... At first I was deeply shaken ... I was so excited that I could not think of sleep. So I left the house ... and awaited the sunrise on top of a rock.
Werner Heisenberg
#12. After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.
Werner Heisenberg
#13. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.
Werner Heisenberg
#14. The discontinuous 'reduction of the wave packets' which cannot be derived from Schroedinger's equation is ... a consequence of the transition from the possible to the actual.
Werner Heisenberg
#15. I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language.
Werner Heisenberg
#16. [T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.
Werner Heisenberg
#17. What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal.
Werner Heisenberg
#18. Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.
Werner Heisenberg
#19. The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand.
Werner Heisenberg
#21. One may say that in a state of science where fundamental concepts have to be changed, tradition is both the condition for progress and a hindrance. Hence, it usually takes a long time before the new concepts are generally accepted.
Werner Heisenberg
#22. Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular.
Werner Heisenberg
#23. "Uncertainty" is NOT "I don't know." It is "I can't know." "I am uncertain" does not mean "I could be certain."
Werner Heisenberg
#24. Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.
Werner Heisenberg
#25. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding.
Werner Heisenberg
#26. It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.
Werner Heisenberg
#27. The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.
Werner Heisenberg
#28. Reports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists. With all this information available, at least to privileged persons, I cannot understand why it is generally held in the United States that we completely missed the basic principle of the bomb until after Hiroshima.
Werner Heisenberg
#29. The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.
Werner Heisenberg
#30. The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus.
Werner Heisenberg
#31. Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.
Werner Heisenberg
#32. Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.
Werner Heisenberg
#33. The more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa.
Werner Heisenberg
#34. It is true that in quantum theory we cannot rely on strict causality. But by repeating the experiments many times, we can finally derive from the observations statistical distributions, and by repeating such series of experiments, we can arrive at objective statements concerning these distributions.
Werner Heisenberg
#35. When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity ? And why turbulence ? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.
Werner Heisenberg
#36. By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a point where further division has no meaning.
Werner Heisenberg
#37. I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.
Werner Heisenberg
#39. The more closely you look at one thing, the less closely can you see something else.
Werner Heisenberg
#40. The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form - the one of the particles, the other of the waves - are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases.
Werner Heisenberg
#41. There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
Werner Heisenberg
#42. The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.
Werner Heisenberg
#43. Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
Werner Heisenberg
#44. Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Werner Heisenberg
#45. The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct "actuality" of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however.
Werner Heisenberg
#46. Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method ... changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the object.
Werner Heisenberg
#47. Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.
Werner Heisenberg
#48. Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values.
Werner Heisenberg
#49. In my paper the fact the XY was not equal to YX was very disagreeable to me. I felt this was the only point of difficulty in the whole scheme ... and I was not able to solve it.
Werner Heisenberg
#50. The uncertainty relation does not refer to the past; if the velocity of the electron is at first known and the position then exactly measured, the position for times previous to the measurement may be calculated.
Werner Heisenberg
#51. Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics
Werner Heisenberg
#52. There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.
Werner Heisenberg
#54. A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.
Werner Heisenberg
#55. The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.
Werner Heisenberg
#56. An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.
Werner Heisenberg
#57. The conception of objective reality ... has thus evaporated ... into the transparent clarity of mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.
Werner Heisenberg
#58. Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.
Werner Heisenberg
#59. Nature is made in such a way as to be able to be understood. Or perhaps I should put it-more correctly-the other way around, and say that we are made in such a way as to be able to understand Nature.
Werner Heisenberg
#60. The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.
Werner Heisenberg
#61. Separation of the observer from the phenomenon to be observed is no longer possible.
Werner Heisenberg
#62. The one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent.
Werner Heisenberg
#63. My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.
Werner Heisenberg
#64. We will have to abandon the philosophy of Democritus and the concept of elementary particles. We should accept instead the concept of elementary symmetries.
Werner Heisenberg
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