What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
WERNER HEISENBERGIf the lecture is good, then everything is too smooth. That’s the same in music: if the performance is too good, you really don’t enjoy it, because it just goes by, and you can never penetrate into the heart of it.
More Werner Heisenberg Quotes
-
-
Reports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists.
WERNER HEISENBERG -
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.
WERNER HEISENBERG -
Whoever dedicates his life to searching out particular connections of nature will spontaneously be confronted with the question how they harmoniously fit into the whole.
WERNER HEISENBERG -
Bohr’s influence on the physics and the physicists of our century was stronger than that of anyone else, even than that of Albert Einstein.
WERNER HEISENBERG -
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.
WERNER HEISENBERG -
If we made atomic bombs, we would bring about a terrible change in the world. Who knows what would happen from this?
WERNER HEISENBERG -
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 HEISENBERG -
It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data.
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 -
I think that if a United States of Europe were to be formed, it would be in our interests to fight for it, as all our old traditions would remain in such a united Europe, whereas if we were to start now as part of the Russian Empire, everything that had ever been in Germany would disappear.
WERNER HEISENBERG -
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.
WERNER HEISENBERG -
Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
WERNER HEISENBERG -
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.
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 -
Certainly, in the course of time, the splendid things will separate from the hateful.
WERNER HEISENBERG