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 HEISENBERGWhoever 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 HEISENBERGSometimes a poor performance is better for enjoyment, because you can look at those things that were wrong and analyze them.
WERNER HEISENBERGIn 1924, I became a Dozent in Gottingen and worked out the quantum mechanics during a holiday stay on Heligoland.
WERNER HEISENBERGThe 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 HEISENBERGIf we made atomic bombs, we would bring about a terrible change in the world. Who knows what would happen from this?
WERNER HEISENBERGEvery word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
WERNER HEISENBERGThe 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.
WERNER HEISENBERGIf 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 HEISENBERGI 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.
WERNER HEISENBERGThe single life is bearable to me only through my work in science, but for the long term, it would be very bad if I had to make do without a very young person next to me.
WERNER HEISENBERGI 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 HEISENBERGReports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists.
WERNER HEISENBERGThe 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 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.
WERNER HEISENBERGIt is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data.
WERNER HEISENBERGWith 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.
WERNER HEISENBERG