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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.

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
Uncertainty
Certain
Doe
Mean
Uncertain
Arrogance

More quotes by 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.
Werner Heisenberg
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Unless you stake your life, life will not be won.
Werner Heisenberg
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Thus, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely.
Werner Heisenberg
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Science clears the fields on which technology can build.
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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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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My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.
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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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.
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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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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Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular.
Werner Heisenberg
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The very act of observing disturbs the system.
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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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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The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science
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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Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.
Werner Heisenberg
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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'
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