Werner Heisenberg Quotes on Nature
Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist and one of the principal architects of quantum mechanics. This page collects quotes attributed to Werner Heisenberg on the topic of nature, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. -
Attributed to Werner Heisenberg:
“Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”
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Attributed to Werner Heisenberg:
“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature subjected to our way of asking questions.”
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“Introductory" in The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory (1930) as translated by Carl Eckhart and Frank C. Hoyt, p. 10”
Light and matter are both single entities, and the apparent duality arises in the limitations of our language . It is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the processes occurring within the atoms, for, as has been remarked, it was invented to describe the experiences of daily life , and these consist only of processes involving exceedingly large numbers of atoms. Furt -
“Critique of the Physical Concepts of the Corpuscular Theory" in The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory (1930) as translated by Carl Eckhart and Frank C. Hoyt, p. 20; also in "The Uncertainty Principle" in The World of Mathematics : A Small Library of the Literature of Mathematics (1956) by James Roy Newman, p. 1051”
Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.