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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
Things
Atoms
World
Possibilities
Physics
Possibility
Rather
Facts
Potentialities
Form
Elementary
Real
Particles

More quotes by Werner Heisenberg

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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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A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.
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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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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.
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Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it.
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An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them.
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Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
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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.
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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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Science clears the fields on which technology can build.
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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.
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The very act of observing disturbs the system.
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My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.
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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.
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It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.
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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.
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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.
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There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
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Unless you stake your life, life will not be won.
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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