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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.

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
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Understanding
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Even
Physicist
Plain
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More quotes by Werner Heisenberg

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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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Unless you stake your life, life will not be won.
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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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There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
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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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[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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Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics
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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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It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.
Werner Heisenberg
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Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it.
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Looking at something changes it.
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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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Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.
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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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The more closely you look at one thing, the less closely can you see something else.
Werner Heisenberg
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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.
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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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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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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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Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves
Werner Heisenberg