Werner Heisenberg Quotes

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.

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

The very act of observing disturbs the system.

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

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

After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense.

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

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

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

Unless you stake your life, life will not be won.

Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[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.

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

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

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

Science clears the fields on which technology can build.

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

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

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

The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.

Separation of the observer from the phenomenon to be observed is no longer possible.

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 you.

The more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa.

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

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

The Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.