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

More quotes by Werner Heisenberg

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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.
Werner Heisenberg
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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
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Looking at something changes it.
Werner Heisenberg
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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
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A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.
Werner Heisenberg
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It seems sensible to discard all hope of observing hitherto unobservable quantities, such as the position and period of the electron... Instead it seems more reasonable to try to establish a theoretical quantum mechanics, analogous to classical mechanics, but in which only relations between observable quantities occur.
Werner Heisenberg
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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
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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.
Werner Heisenberg
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The more closely you look at one thing, the less closely can you see something else.
Werner Heisenberg
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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
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Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves
Werner Heisenberg
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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
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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
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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.
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.
Werner Heisenberg
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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.
Werner Heisenberg
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Both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time - the two concepts are too different
Werner Heisenberg
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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.
Werner Heisenberg
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It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.
Werner Heisenberg
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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.
Werner Heisenberg