Werner Heisenberg Quotes

I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves. ~ Werner Heisenberg

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language. ~ Werner Heisenberg

The uncertainty relation does not refer to the past; if the velocity of the electron is at first known and the position then exactly measured, the position for times previous to the measurement may be calculated. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Modern physics has changed nothing in the great classical disciplines of, for instance, mechanics, optics, and heat. Only the conception of hitherto unexplored regions, formed prematurely from a knowledge of only certain parts of the world, has undergone a decisive transformation. This conception, however, is always decisive for the future course of research. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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. ~ Werner Heisenberg

It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth. ~ Werner Heisenberg

The German physicists knew at least so much about the manufacture and construction of atomic bombs that it was clear to them that the manufacture of bombs in Germany could not succeed during the war. For this reason, they were spared the moral decision whether they should make an atomic bomb, and they had only worked on the uranium engine. ~ Werner Heisenberg

If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli's, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamentally skeptical point of view. In reality however, behind this outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli's analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists. ~ Werner Heisenberg

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself. ~ Werner Heisenberg

The more closely you look at one thing, the less closely can you see something else. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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. ~ Werner Heisenberg

The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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. These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human nature, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions: hence if they actually meet, that is, if they are at least so much related to each other that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that new and interesting developments may follow. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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

Es gibt keinen Gott und Dirac ist sein Prophet. (There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet.)

{A remark made during the Fifth Solvay International Conference (October 1927), after a discussion of the religious views of various physicists, at which all the participants laughed, including Dirac, as quoted in Teil und das Ganze (1969), by Werner Heisenberg, p. 119; it is an ironic play on the Muslim statement of faith, the Shahada, often translated: 'There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet.'} ~ Wolfgang Pauli

The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments. But he has to speak about his results also to non-physicists who will not be satisfied unless some explanation is given in plain language. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be the criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.
Physics and Philosophy ~ Werner Heisenberg

I am firmly convinced that we must never judge political movements by their aims, no matter how loudly proclaimed or how sincerely upheld, but only by the means they use to realize these aims. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Physicists often quote from T. H. White's epic novel The Once and Future King , where a society of ants declares, 'Everything not forbidden is compulsory.' In other words, if there isn't a basic principle of physics forbidding time travel, then time travel is necessarily a physical possibility. (The reason for this is the uncertainty principle. Unless something is forbidden, quantum effects and fluctuations will eventually make it possible if we wait long enough. Thus, unless there is a law forbidding it, it will eventually occur.) ~ Michio Kaku

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies. ~ Werner Heisenberg

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values. ~ Werner Heisenberg

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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

[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. ~ Werner Heisenberg

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them. ~ Werner Heisenberg

The uncertainty principle refers to the degree of indeterminateness in the possible present knowledge of the simultaneous values of various quantities with which the quantum theory deals; it does not restrict, for example, the exactness of a position measurement alone or a velocity measurement alone. ~ Werner Heisenberg

The very act of observing disturbs the system. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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. ~ Werner Heisenberg

In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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. ~ Werner Heisenberg

In America, it was decided to attempt the production of atomic bombs with an effort that would constitute a large part of the collective American war effort. In Germany, an effort one thousandth the scale of the American was applied to the problem of producing atomic energy that would drive engines. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding. ~ Werner Heisenberg

It is seen that 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

Nature is made in such a way as to be able to be understood. Or perhaps I should put it-more correctly-the other way around, and say that we are made in such a way as to be able to understand Nature. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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? ~ Werner Heisenberg

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. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics ~ Werner Heisenberg

Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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. ~ Werner Heisenberg

The one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent. ~ Werner Heisenberg

The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not of atoms. The physicist Werner Heisenberg declared that the universe is made of music, not of matter. And we believe that if you habitually expose yourself to toxic stories and music, you could wind up living in the wrong universe, where it's impossible to become the gorgeous genius you were born to be. That's why we implore you to nourish yourself with delicious, nutritious tales and tunes that inspire you to exercise your willpower for your highest good. ~ Rob Brezsny

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

We will have to abandon the philosophy of Democritus and the concept of elementary particles. We should accept instead the concept of elementary symmetries. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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

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. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory with those of the quantum theory. The extraordinary advances made in this field by Dirac ... leave open the question whether it will be possible to satisfy the claims of the two theories without at the same time determining the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Thus, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely. ~ Werner Heisenberg

The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe it. ~ Werner Heisenberg

"Uncertainty" is NOT "I don't know." It is "I can't know." "I am uncertain" does not mean "I could be certain." ~ Werner Heisenberg

Although the theory of relativity makes the greatest of demands on the ability for abstract thought, still it fulfills the traditional requirements of science insofar as it permits a division of the world into subject and object (observer and observed) and, hence, a clear formulation of the law of causality. ~ Werner Heisenberg

In classical physics, science started from the belief – or should one say, from the illusion? – that we could describe the world, or least parts of the world, without any reference to ourselves. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created. ~ Werner Heisenberg

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

It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data. If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Science clears the fields on which technology can build. ~ Werner Heisenberg

Reports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists. With all this information available, at least to privileged persons, I cannot understand why it is generally held in the United States that we completely missed the basic principle of the bomb until after Hiroshima. ~ Werner Heisenberg

I aim to help the Germans and the Europeans successfully travel all the way down the path toward European integration, and I can do this more effectively if I don't commit myself to a party. ~ Hans-Werner Sinn

On working with director Werner Herzog: I have to shoot without any breaks. I yell at Herzog and hit him. I have to fight for every sequence. I wish Herzog would catch the plague. ~ Klaus Kinski

If you're purely after facts, please buy yourself the phone directory of Manhattan. It has four million times correct facts. But it doesn't illuminate. ~ Werner Herzog

Doesn't look like much, does he?" murmurs Frederick. "Hardly a couple of ounces of feathers and bones. But that bird can fly to Africa and back. Powered by bugs and worms and desire."
The wagtail hops from twig to twig. Werner rubs his aching eyes. It's just a bird.
"Ten thousand years ago," whispers Frederick, "they came through here in the millions. When this place was a garden, one endless garden from end to end. ~ Anthony Doerr

There is a fascination about crime, which is understandable, but hardly anyone talks about the families of victims of violent crime and the devastation that is beyond the victim alone. ~ Werner Herzog

Come, dry your eyes, for you are LIFE, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly.
Dry your eyes, and let's go home. ~ Alan Moore

Capitalism designates an economic system significantly characterized by the predominance of " capital ." Capitalism and double entry bookkeeping are absolutely indissociable; their relationship to each other is that of form to content. ~ Werner Sombart

I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals. ~ Werner Herzog

So long as you do not know who you really are, this will be difficult. You may have to give up a lot of things to which you may be attached. You may have to give up your resentments, your anger, your upset, your annoyance, your desire to punish. ~ Werner Erhard

In this conversation we discover another possibility: living in a way, now, moment to moment, that makes a difference to life. We discover that as human beings we can live in a possibility instead of in what we have inherited, that instead of just being a human being because we were born that way, we can declare the possibility of being for human beings. This is the work of transformation: bringing forth a breakthrough in the possibility of being human. ~ Werner Erhard

A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no. ~ Werner Herzog

I'm not a journalist; I'm a poet. ~ Werner Herzog

At the press conference for the film he impressed everyone with his complete sincerity and innocence. he said he had come to see the sea for the first time and marveled at how clean it was. someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. 'when the world is emptied of human beings' he said, 'it will become so again ~ Werner Herzog

I'm very surprised at that, yes, because there were many chances for it to be in Germany once the syndication market started and it continually just did not happen. ~ Werner Klemperer

Werner, that you're from, nowhere, that you shouldn't dream big. But I believe in you. Think you'll do something great. ~ Anthony Doerr

[Alan] Watts did two main things for me. He opened up the connections between what I was doing and the traditional Oriental philosophies. And he pointed me toward the distinction between Self and Mind. ~ Werner Erhard

When I say tourism is sin and traveling on foot is virtue, it's condensed into a dictum. It's much more complex than that, but let's face it, for me, my experience, the world reveals itself to those that travel on foot. You understand the world in a much deeper level. And it does good to anyone who makes film. ~ Werner Herzog

Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can't have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle's velocity - ~ Thomas Pynchon

Amazon, for its part, has a couple of other easy suggestions for you if the advice "write a hypothetical press release" doesn't quite work for your situation. Their CTO, Werner Vogels, suggests trying to write an FAQ for this product you're developing. (That way you can address, in advance, potential user issues and questions.)9 Or try to define the crucial parts of the user experience by making mockups of pages, writing hypothetical case studies so you can actually start to see what it would look like and who it would work for and how. Finally, try writing the user manual, which as Werner explains usually has three parts: concepts, how-to, and reference. (Defining these means you understand your idea in and out from the customers perspective. Also, he says, if you have more than one type of user then write multiple manuals.) ~ Ryan Holiday

I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema. ~ Werner Herzog

I was born on June 3rd, 1929, in Graenichen in the Canton of Aargau, Switzerland, where I went to the public schools until the age of 16. ~ Werner Arber

Opportunity: it's not really scarce. It's everywhere.
If you really were any good, you'd be overwhelmed by it. ~ Werner Erhard

Ah, what he is; that is quite another thing. I have seen so many remarkable things in him, that if you would have me really say what I think, I shall reply that I really do look upon him as one of Byron's heroes, whom misery has marked with a fatal brand; some Manfred, some Lara, some Werner, one of those wrecks, as it were, of some ancient family, who, disinherited of their patrimony, have achieved one by the force of their adventurous genius, which has placed them above the laws of society. ~ Alexandre Dumas

Once in a while I come across a director who hasgrown up thousands of miles from me, and the work touches me.Through these issues/50/images I am connected and something is illuminated.And I know then that I am not alone. ~ Werner Herzog

Your power is a function of velocity, that is to say, your power is a function of the rate at which you translate intention into reality. Most of us disempower ourselves by finding a way to slow, impede, or make more complex than necessary the process of translating intention into reality. ~ Werner Erhard

You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise. ~ Werner Herzog

I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground. ~ Werner Herzog

Colluded with German communists to build a secret radio and send messages to the Allies. In addition to his endless work week, Werner also had ~ Edith Hahn Beer

My four things I care about are truth, meaning, fitness and grace. [...] Sam [Harris] would like to make an argument that the better and more rational our thinking is, the more it can do everything that religion once did. [...] I think about my personal physics hero, Dirac – who was the guy who came up with the equation for the electron, less well-known than the Einstein equations but arguably even more beautiful...in order to predict that, he needed a positively-charged and a negatively-charged particle, and the only two known at the time were the electron and the proton to make up, let's say, a hydrogen atom. Well, the proton is quite a bit heavier than the electron and so he told the story that wasn't really true, where the proton was the anti-particle of the electron, and Heisenberg pointed out that that couldn't be because the masses are too far off and they have to be equal. Well, a short time later, the anti-electron -- the positron, that is -- was found, I guess by Anderson at Caltech in the early 30s and then an anti-proton was created some time later. So it turned out that the story had more meaning than the exact version of the story...so the story was sort of more true than the version of the story that was originally told. And I could tell you a similar story with Einstein, I could tell it to you with Darwin, who, you know, didn't fully understand the implications of his theory, as is evidenced by his screwing up a particular kind of orchid in his later work...no ~ Eric R. Weinstein

Even when they are saturated in the sense of the older theory of valence, the elementary atoms still possess sufficient chemical affinity to bind other seemingly also saturated atoms and groups of atoms, under generation of clearly defined atomic bonds. ~ Alfred Werner