Werner Heisenberg Quotes

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.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.

[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.

"Uncertainty" is NOT "I don't know." It is "I can't know." "I am uncertain" does not mean "I could be certain."

The more closely you look at one thing, the less closely can you see something else.

Looking at something changes it.

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe it.

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them.

The more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa.

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.

The one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent.

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

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.

Thus, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely.

Unless you stake your life, life will not be won.

Science clears the fields on which technology can build.

Whenever we proceed from the known to the unkown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'

...separation of the observer from the phenomenon to be observed is no longer possible.

Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.

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.

It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it.

Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves

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.

The very act of observing disturbs the system.

We will have to abandon the philosophy of Democritus and the concept of elementary particles. We should accept instead the concept of elementary symmetries.

Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.

I believe that the existence of the classical "path" can be pregnantly formulated as follows: The "path" comes into existence only when we observe it.

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.

The Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.

Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular.

Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.

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.

I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.

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.

The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus.

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.

Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics

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.

Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.

It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet.

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.

A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.

The single life is bearable to me only through my work in science, but for the long term, it would be very bad if I had to make do without a very young person next to me.

Whoever dedicates his life to searching out particular connections of nature will spontaneously be confronted with the question how they harmoniously fit into the whole.