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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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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
Actual
Packets
Wave
Discontinuous
Consequence
Equation
Possible
Derived
Science
Reduction
Cannot
Mechanic
Equations
Transition

More quotes by 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.
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Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.
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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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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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Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.
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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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...separation of the observer from the phenomenon to be observed is no longer possible.
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What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
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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'
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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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A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.
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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What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal.
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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.
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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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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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Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.
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The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe it.
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Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life.
Werner Heisenberg