Werner Heisenberg

“what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning’.77”

— Werner Heisenberg

Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.

— Werner Heisenberg

The more closely you look at one thing, the less closely can you see something else.

— Werner Heisenberg

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

— Werner Heisenberg

The very act of observing disturbs the system.

— Werner Heisenberg

The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.

— Werner Heisenberg

It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.

— Werner Heisenberg

Science clears the fields on which technology can build.

— Werner Heisenberg

There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity…

— Werner Heisenberg

The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and…

— Werner Heisenberg

By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a…

— Werner Heisenberg

An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid…

— Werner Heisenberg

I would like to mention astrophysics; in this field, the strange properties of the pulsars and quasars, and perhaps also the gravitational…

— Werner Heisenberg

The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus.

— Werner Heisenberg

Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics

— 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

The Anglo-Americans want the balance of power in Eurasia. The only balance of power they can achieve now is the whole of…

— Werner Heisenberg

Although the theory of relativity makes the greatest of demands on the ability for abstract thought, still it fulfills the traditional requirements…

— Werner Heisenberg

“The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been…

— Werner Heisenberg

The structure underlying the phenomena is not given by material objects like the atoms of Democritus but by the form that determines…

— Werner Heisenberg

What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in…

— Werner Heisenberg

The conception of objective reality ... has thus evaporated ... into the transparent clarity of mathematics that represents no longer the behavior…

— Werner Heisenberg

The uncertainty principle refers to the degree of indeterminateness in the possible present knowledge of the simultaneous values of various quantities with…

— Werner Heisenberg

This proving of such and such I found to be almost like cheating. You start somewhere, and then you go into a…

— Werner Heisenberg

“In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be…

— Werner Heisenberg

The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which…

— Werner Heisenberg

“Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory…

— Werner Heisenberg

The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments.…

— Werner Heisenberg

If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty - by forms I am referring to coherent systems of…

— Werner Heisenberg

You may object that by speaking of simplicity and beauty I am introducing aesthetic criteria of truth, and I frankly admit that…

— Werner Heisenberg

The incomplete knowledge of a system must be an essential part of every formulation in quantum theory. Quantum theoretical laws must be…

— Werner Heisenberg

It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those…

— Werner Heisenberg

“If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli 's, at first we would be inclined…

— Werner Heisenberg

The one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent.

— Werner Heisenberg

Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows.

— Werner Heisenberg

Unless you stake your life, life will not be won.

— Werner Heisenberg

Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it.

— Werner Heisenberg

The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe it.

— Werner Heisenberg

Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.

— Werner Heisenberg

Certainly, in the course of time, the splendid things will separate from the hateful.

— Werner Heisenberg