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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.

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
Made
Understood
Way
Perhaps
Understanding
Understand
Science
Nature
Around
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More quotes by Werner Heisenberg

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Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Werner Heisenberg
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Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
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
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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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After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.
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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A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.
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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Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.
Werner Heisenberg
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My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.
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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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 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.
Werner Heisenberg
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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 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.
Werner Heisenberg
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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.
Werner Heisenberg
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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?
Werner Heisenberg
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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.
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 Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.
Werner Heisenberg