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

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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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Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
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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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Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics
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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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Looking at something changes it.
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What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
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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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Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through 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.
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There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.
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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 reality we can put into words is never reality itself.
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Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.
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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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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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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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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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The Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.
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There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.
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