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[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

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Werner Heisenberg
Age: 74 †
Born: 1901
Born: December 5
Died: 1976
Died: February 1
Academic
Mathematician
Mountaineer
Non-Fiction Writer
Nuclear Physicist
Physicist
Theoretical Physicist
University Teacher
Kreisfreie Stadt Würzburg
Werner Karl Heisenberg
Heisenberg
Werner K. Heisenberg
Possibility
Rather
Facts
Potentialities
Form
Elementary
Real
Particles
Things
Atoms
World
Possibilities
Physics

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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
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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.
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Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.
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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.
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The very act of observing disturbs the system.
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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?
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Uncertainty is NOT I don't know. It is I can't know. I am uncertain does not mean I could be certain.
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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.
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The Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.
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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'
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The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus.
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Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular.
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Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.
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Thus, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely.
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Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.
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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.
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Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.
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After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.
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We will have to abandon the philosophy of Democritus and the concept of elementary particles. We should accept instead the concept of elementary symmetries.
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Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves
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