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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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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
Mathematics
Evaporated
Thus
Particles
Behavior
Transparent
Longer
Represents
Knowledge
Objective
Rather
Conception
Science
Objectives
Reality
Clarity

More quotes by Werner Heisenberg

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In the strict formulation of the law of causality—if we know the present, we can calculate the future—it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise. On an implication of the uncertainty principle.
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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.
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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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Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
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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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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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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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Looking at something changes it.
Werner Heisenberg
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The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct actuality of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however.
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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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The more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa.
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What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
Werner Heisenberg
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The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe it.
Werner Heisenberg
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Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.
Werner Heisenberg
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Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics
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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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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The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.
Werner Heisenberg
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I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.
Werner Heisenberg
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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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