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 HEISENBERGEvery word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
More Werner Heisenberg Quotes
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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.
WERNER HEISENBERG -
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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The 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.
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It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data.
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What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
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Reports in Washington show that our reasoning was just like that of your physicists.
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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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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 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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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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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.
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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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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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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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Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
WERNER HEISENBERG