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.
WERNER HEISENBERGIf we made atomic bombs, we would bring about a terrible change in the world. Who knows what would happen from this?
More Werner Heisenberg Quotes
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Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves.
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What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
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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.
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If 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.
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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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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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If we made atomic bombs, we would bring about a terrible change in the world. Who knows what would happen from this?
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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Reports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists.
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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.
WERNER HEISENBERG