Werner Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
Werner Karl Heisenbergwas a German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series of papers with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, during the same year, this matrix formulation of quantum mechanics was substantially elaborated. In 1927 he published his uncertainty principle, upon which he built his philosophy and for which he is best known. Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth5 December 1901
CityWurzburg, Germany
CountryGermany
The conception of objective reality ... has thus evaporated ... into the transparent clarity of mathematics that represents no longer the behavior of particles but rather our knowledge of this behavior.
There is a fundamental error in separating the parts from the whole, the mistake of atomizing what should not be atomized. Unity and complementarity constitute reality.
Therefore, the two processes, that of science and that of art, are not very different. Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality, and the coherent sets of concepts as well as the different styles of art are different words or groups of words in this language.
The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.
The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite.
[T]he atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.
It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet. These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human nature, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions: hence if they actually meet, that is, if they are at least so much related to each other that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that new and interesting developments may follow.
Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.
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.
It seems sensible to discard all hope of observing hitherto unobservable quantities, such as the position and period of the electron... Instead it seems more reasonable to try to establish a theoretical quantum mechanics, analogous to classical mechanics, but in which only relations between observable quantities occur.
A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.
Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability.
Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves