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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.

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
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Questioning
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Observe
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Method
Experiment
Nature
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Work
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Observation
Natural
Experiments
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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.
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Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it.
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Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
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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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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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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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Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.
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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.
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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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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.
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The very act of observing disturbs the system.
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The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe 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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Looking at something changes it.
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The more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa.
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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.
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Science clears the fields on which technology can build.
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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.
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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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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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