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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.

Werner Heisenberg

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Werner Heisenberg
Age: 74 †
Born: 1901
Born: December 5
Died: 1976
Died: February 1
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Kreisfreie Stadt Würzburg
Werner Karl Heisenberg
Heisenberg
Werner K. Heisenberg
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More quotes by 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
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Science clears the fields on which technology can build.
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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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A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.
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Many people will tell you that an expert is someone who knows a great deal about the subject. To this I would object that one can never know much about any subject. I would much prefer the following definition: an expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in the subject, and how to avoid them.
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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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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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Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves
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What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
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The one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent.
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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.
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Both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time - the two concepts are too different
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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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Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
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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.
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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
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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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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.
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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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[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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