Werner Heisenberg Quotes

77 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
Science progresses not only because it helps to explain newly discovered facts, but also because it teaches us over and over again what the word "understanding" may mean.

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

Werner Heisenberg
It is important that we should understand the "handwriting" of atoms for it is something which has not been thought out by man; it has far deeper meaning. Even when we shall have mastered and understood it, let us not forget that is the content not the words which is important in a tragedy or comedy and that this also holds good for our world.

Werner Heisenberg
Almost every progress in science has been paid by a sacrifice, for almost every new intellectual achievement previous positions and conceptions had to be given up. Thus, in a way, the increase of knowledge and insight diminishes continually the scientist's claim to "understand" nature.

Werner Heisenberg
The conception of the objective reality of the elementary particles has thus evaporated in a curious way, not into the fog of some new, obscure, or not yet understood reality concept, but into the transparent clarity of a mathematics that represents no longer the behavior or the elementary particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.

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

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
Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality, and the coherent sets of concepts as well as the different styles of art are different words or groups of words in this language.

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

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
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
Quantum theory reminds us of the old wisdom that when searching for harmony in life we must forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both players and spectators.

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
The genuine solution of a difficult problem is neither more nor less than a glimpse of the wider context, a glimpse that helps us to clear away other difficulties as well, including many whose existence we do not even suspect.

Werner Heisenberg
Words are not so clearly defined as they seem to be at first sight and... they have only a limited range of applicability.

Werner Heisenberg
The assumption [is] 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
I am convinced that the spectrum of all chemical elements can be obtained... from quantum theory in a unique manner without physics by boneheaded calculation.

Werner Heisenberg