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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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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
Comes
Believe
Formulated
Classical
Observe
Follows
Path
Existence

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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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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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The one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent.
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Unless you stake your life, life will not be won.
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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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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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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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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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Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
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After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.
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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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The more closely you look at one thing, the less closely can you see something else.
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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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Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.
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What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
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Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables.
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Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular.
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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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