Werner Heisenberg Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Werner Heisenberg
If one finds a difficulty in a calculation which is otherwise quite convincing, one should not push the difficulty away; one should rather try to make it the centre of the whole thing.

Werner Heisenberg
The idea that we do observe something already indicates something irreversible. If we draw a pencil line on a paper, for instance, we have established something which cannot be undone, so to speak. Every observation is irreversible, because we have gained information that cannot be forgotten.

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
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
How can one divide an elementary particle? Certainly only by using extreme forces and very sharp tools. The only tools available are other elementary particles. Therefore, collisions between particles of extremely high energy would be the only processes by which the particles could be eventually divided.

Werner Heisenberg
Take from your scientific work a serious and incorruptible method of thought, help to spread it, because no understanding is possible without it. Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.

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
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
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
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
I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?

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

Werner Heisenberg