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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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Werner Heisenberg
Age: 74 †
Born: 1901
Born: December 5
Died: 1976
Died: February 1
Academic
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Mountaineer
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Nuclear Physicist
Physicist
Theoretical Physicist
University Teacher
Kreisfreie Stadt Würzburg
Werner Karl Heisenberg
Heisenberg
Werner K. 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.
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Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.
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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 more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa.
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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.
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It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.
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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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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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We will have to abandon the philosophy of Democritus and the concept of elementary particles. We should accept instead the concept of elementary symmetries.
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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.
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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.
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In my paper the fact the XY was not equal to YX was very disagreeable to me. I felt this was the only point of difficulty in the whole scheme...and I was not able to solve it.
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Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.
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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.
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The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe it.
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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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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.
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There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
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Thus, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely.
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