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The very act of observing disturbs the system.

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
Observing
System
Disturbs

More quotes by Werner Heisenberg

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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.
Werner Heisenberg
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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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Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.
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The more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa.
Werner Heisenberg
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By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a point where further division has no meaning.
Werner Heisenberg
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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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Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular.
Werner Heisenberg
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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.
Werner Heisenberg
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Thus, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely.
Werner Heisenberg
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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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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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I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.
Werner Heisenberg
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My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.
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Both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time - the two concepts are too different
Werner Heisenberg
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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.
Werner Heisenberg
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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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The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus.
Werner Heisenberg
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Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.
Werner Heisenberg
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The one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent.
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The solution of the difficulty is that the two mental pictures which experiment lead us to form - the one of the particles, the other of the waves - are both incomplete and have only the validity of analogies which are accurate only in limiting cases.
Werner Heisenberg