Werner Heisenberg Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

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 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
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.

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

Werner Heisenberg
Only those revolutions in science will prove fruitful and beneficial whose investigators try to change as little as possible and limit themselves to the solution of a particular and clearly defined problem. Any attempt to make a clean sweep of everything or to change things arbitrarily leads to utter confusion.

Werner Heisenberg
The mathematical formulas indeed no longer portray nature, but rather our knowledge of nature.

Werner Heisenberg
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.

Werner Heisenberg
All the qualities of the atom of modem physics are derived, it has no immediate and direct physical properties at all, i.e., every type of visual conception we might wish to design is eo ipso, faulty.

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
A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.

Werner Heisenberg
Natural science always presupposes man, and we must become aware of the fact that... we are not only spectators but also always participants on the stage of life.

Werner Heisenberg
In the light of quantum theory these elementary particles are no longer real in the same sense as objects of daily life, trees or stones, but appear as abstractions derived from the real material of observation in the true sense.

Werner Heisenberg
Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language.

Werner Heisenberg
In physics, we can only work with the assumption that we have natural laws. If we have no natural laws, then anything can happen, and we can only describe what we see, and that's all.

Werner Heisenberg
If nature leads to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty — to forms that no one has previously encountered — we cannot help thinking that they are true and that they revealed genuine features of Nature.

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 basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus.

Werner Heisenberg
The hope that new experiments will lead us back to objective events in time and space is about as well-founded as the hope of discovering the end of the world in the unexplored regions of the Antarctic.

Werner Heisenberg
[The probability wave] meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of "Potentia" in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.

Werner Heisenberg
Atoms are neither things nor objects... atoms are part of observational situations.

Werner Heisenberg
In the experiments about atomic events we have to do with things and facts, with phenomena that are just as real as any phenomena in daily life. But the atoms of the elementary particles are not as real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

Werner Heisenberg
However the development proceeds in detail, the path so far traced by the quantum theory indicates that an understanding of those still unclarified features of atomic physics can only be acquired by foregoing visualization and objectification to an extent greater than that customary hitherto. We have probably no reason to regret this, because the thought of the great epistemological difficulties with which the visual atom concept of earlier physics had to contend gives us the hope that the abstracter atomic physics developing at present will one day fit more harmoniously into the great edifice of Science.

Werner Heisenberg
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.

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