Werner Heisenberg Quotes

Every new theory encounters opposition and rejection at first. The adherents of the old, accepted doctrine object to the new theory, refuse it recognition, and declare it to be mistaken. Years, even decades, must pass before it succeeds in supplanting the old one. A new generation must grow up before its victory is decisive.

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.

I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago.

Fundamental progress has to do with the reinterpretation of basic ideas.

Mainstream science starts as heresy.

Modern physics often advances only by sacrificing some of our traditional philosophical convictions

Progress in science occurs in fits and starts, and paradigm shifts occur when evidence can be marshaled to support a new point of view.

In science, each new point of view calls forth a revolution in nomenclature.

The universe was a vast machine yesterday, it is a hologram today. Who knows what intellectual rattle we'll be shaking tomorrow.

In science novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.

Science has often resisted new ideas and fought bitterly to prevent them coming on board.

Has science ever retreated? No! It is Catholicism which has always retreated before her, and will always be forced to retreat.

It is more parsimonious to assume that the sun goes around the Earth, that atoms at the smallest scale operate in accordance with the same rules that objects at larger scales follow, and that we perceive what is really out there. All of these positions were long defended by argument from parsimony, and they were all wrong.

From Euclid to Newton there were straight lines. The modern age analyzes the wavers.

I may conclude this chapter by quoting a saying of Professor Agassiz, that whenever a new and startling fact is brought to light in science, people first say, 'it is not true,' then that 'it is contrary to religion,' and lastly, 'that everybody knew it before.'

Imagine how they would have mocked you if you proclaimed, 'Not only is the world a sphere, but there is an invisible, mystical force that holds everything to its surface'!

The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time.

The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of skepticism.

The ground of science was littered with the corpses of dead unified theories.

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error.

Science reserves the highest reward for those of you who disprove our most cherished beliefs. At any moment someone from any walk of life could come forward and be responsible for a complete revision of our view of everything.

The history of acceptance of new theories frequently shows the following steps: At first the new idea is treated as pure nonsense, not worth looking at. Then comes a time when a multitude of contradictory objections are raised, such as: the new theory is too fancy, or merely a new terminology; it is not fruitful, or simply wrong. Finally a state is reached when everyone seems to claim that he had always followed this theory. This usually marks the last state before general acceptance.