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

More quotes by Werner Heisenberg

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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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There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
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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.
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...separation of the observer from the phenomenon to be observed is no longer possible.
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Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.
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Looking at something changes it.
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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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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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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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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 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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Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
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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 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.
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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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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?
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My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.
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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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Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.
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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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