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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.

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
World
Illusion
Extrapolated
Direct
Extrapolation
However
Ontology
Impossible
Rested
Existence
Actuality
Upon
Atomic
Around
Materialism
Kind
Range

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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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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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Science clears the fields on which technology can build.
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In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas- and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed.
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Looking at something changes it.
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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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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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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.
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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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Thus, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely.
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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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Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.
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Unless you stake your life, life will not be won.
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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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There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
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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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The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus.
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The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe it.
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