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Werner Heisenberg Quotes

1901–1976 Germany

Werner Karl Heisenberg (5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976) was a German theoretical physicist, one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics, and a principal scientist in the Nazi nuclear weapons program during World War II. He published his Umdeutung paper in 1925, a major reinterpretation of old quantum theory.

Germany
Academics
Nobel laureates
Philosophers
Physicists

Also known as: Heisenberg, Heisenberg, Werner, Hiesenberg

Random Werner Heisenberg quote

34 quotes

I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair… Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?

The elementary particles in Plato's Timaeus are finally not substance but mathematical forms. "All things are numbers" is a sentence attributed to Pythagoras.

Physics and Philosophy (1958)

Natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our nature of questioning.

Physics and Philosophy (1958)

The law of causality is no longer applied in quantum theory and the law of conservation of matter is no longer true for the elementary particles.

Physics and Philosophy (1958)

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.

Insistence on the postulate of complete logical clarification would make science impossible. We are reminded... of the old wisdom that one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent.

Physics and Philosophy (1958)

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.

I had the feeling that, through the surface of atomic phenomena, I was looking at a strangely beautiful interior, and I felt almost giddy at the thought that I now had to probe this wealth of mathematical structures nature had so generously spread out before me.

Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (1971)

The theory of relativity... showed in a conclusive way that the concept of the ether as a substance, to which Maxwell's equations refer, had to be abandoned. ...the result was that the fields had to be considered as an independent reality.

Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (1958)

The great scientific contribution in theoretical physics that has come from Japan since the last war may be an indication of a certain relationship between philosophical ideas in the tradition of the Far East and the philosophical substance of quantum theory.

The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting the reality into an objective side won’t get us very far.

Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.

Misattributed

Reality is in the observations, not in the electron.

Misattributed

The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for her.

Misattributed

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Werner Heisenberg (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.