Werner Heisenberg Quotes

Nobody ever told us all matter radiated. We just assumed it did.

I had been interested in particle physics, which deals with the fundamental constituents of matter.

Physics has found no straight lines. Instead, the physical universe consists of only waves undulating back and forth allowing for corrections and balance.

In physics, to be in two places at the same time would be a miracle; in politics it seems not merely normal, but natural.

I wrote my epitaph: He started out a particle and ended up a wave.

At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion.

I'm fascinated with quantum physics.

Photons have neither morals or visas.

… theoretical physics is actual philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics), and it has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity) which are applicable far beyond physics.

We might be allowed to... assert that because our only cognitions of matter are cognitions of force, matter in the scientific sense is force.

I love physics.

The dividing line between the wave or particle nature of matter and radiation is the moment “Now.” As this moment steadily advances through time it coagulates a wavy future into a particle past.

Wave particle duality is a core feature of our world. Or rather, we should say, it is a core feature of our mathematical descriptions of our world. But what is critical to note here is that, however ambiguous our images, the universe itself remains whole and is manifestly not fracturing into schizophrenic shards. It is this tantalizing wholeness and the thing itself that drives physicists onward like an eternally beckoning light that seems so teasingly near. It is always out of reach.

You know the Einstein waves can be thought of as a distortion of space and time. But the way we see it, we see it as a distortion of space. And space is enormously stiff. You can't squish it; you can't change its dimensions so easily.

I came to realise that string theory offers us the best hope of finding a unified theory of all matter and forces.

The more you study quantum mechanics, the more crazy and incomprehensible it becomes. You truly do need a Ph.D. in very high level math and science to understand it at a high, high level.

In its efforts to learn as much as possible about nature, modern physics has found that certain things can never be "known" with certainty. Much of our knowledge must always remain uncertain. The most we can know is in terms of probabilities.

The phenomena in these exhausted tubes reveal to physical science a new world-a world where matter may exist in a fourth state, where the corpuscular theory of light may be true, and where light does not always move in straight lines, but where we can never enter, and with which we must be content to observe and experiment from the outside.

Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that this is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not bring us any closer to the secrets of the "Old One." I, at any rate, am convinced that He is not playing at dice.

In physics the truth is rarely perfectly clear, and that is certainly universally the case in human affairs. Hence, what is not surrounded by uncertainty cannot be the truth.

Which came first - the observer or the particle?

There is no place in this new kind of physics both for the field and matter, for the field is the only reality.

[Heisenberg's seminal 1925 paper initiating quantum mechanics marked] one of the great jumps—perhaps the greatest—in the development of twentieth century physics.

A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.

If physics leads us today to a world view which is essentially mystical, it returns, in a way, to its beginning, 2,500 years ago... This time, however, it is not only based on intuition, but also on experiments of great precision and sophistication, and on a rigorous and consistent mathematical formalism.