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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.

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
Really
Ordinary
Way
Problems
Serious
Language
Wish
Speak
Cannot
Atoms
Problem
Structure

More quotes by Werner Heisenberg

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Looking at something changes it.
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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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Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.
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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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By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a point where further division has no meaning.
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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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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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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Science clears the fields on which technology can build.
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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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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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 Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.
Werner Heisenberg
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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.
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.
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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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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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Unless you stake your life, life will not be won.
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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Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Werner Heisenberg