There is a great difference between discoveries and inventions. With discoveries, one can always be skeptical, and many surprises can take place. In the case of inventions, surprises can really only occur for people who have not had anything to do with it.
WERNER HEISENBERGReports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists.
More Werner Heisenberg Quotes
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In Germany, an effort one thousandth the scale of the American was applied to the problem of producing atomic energy that would drive engines.
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The end of the First World War had thrown Germany’s youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger ones drew together in larger and smaller groups to blaze new paths or, at least, to discover a new star to steer by.
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In 1924, I became a Dozent in Gottingen and worked out the quantum mechanics during a holiday stay on Heligoland.
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In America, it was decided to attempt the production of atomic bombs with an effort that would constitute a large part of the collective American war effort.
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Certainly, in the course of time, the splendid things will separate from the hateful.
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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.
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With all this information available, at least to privileged persons, I cannot understand why it is generally held in the United States that we completely missed the basic principle of the bomb until after Hiroshima.
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I believe this uranium business will give the Anglo-Saxons such tremendous power that Europe will become a bloc under Anglo-Saxon domination. If that is the case, it will be a very good thing. I wonder whether Stalin will be able to stand up to the others as he has done in the past.
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Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
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If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities.
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I would like to mention astrophysics; in this field, the strange properties of the pulsars and quasars, and perhaps also the gravitational waves, can be considered as a challenge.
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What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
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Although the theory of relativity makes the greatest of demands on the ability for abstract thought, still it fulfills the traditional requirements of science insofar as it permits a division of the world into subject and object (observer and observed) and, hence, a clear formulation of the law of causality.
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Sometimes a poor performance is better for enjoyment, because you can look at those things that were wrong and analyze them.
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The uncertainty relation does not refer to the past; if the velocity of the electron is at first known and the position then exactly measured, the position for times previous to the measurement may be calculated.
WERNER HEISENBERG






