Werner Heisenberg

1:Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
~ Werner Heisenberg,

2: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.
~ Werner Heisenberg,

3:Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer ... we have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
~ Werner Heisenberg,

4: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. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'.
~ Werner Heisenberg,

5:To The Works Of:
Aristotle, Cassius J. Keyser, Eric T. Bell, G. W. Leibnitz, Eugen Bleuler, J. Locke, Niels Bohr, Jacques Loeb, George Boole, H. A. Lorentz, Max Born, Ernst Mach, Louis De Brogue, J. C. Maxwell, Georg Cantor, Adolf Meyer, Ernst Cassirer, Hermann Minkowsja, Charles M. Child, Isaac Newton, C. Darwin, Ivan Pavlov, Rene Descartes, Giuseppe Peano, P. A. M. Dirac, Max Planck, A. S. Eddington, Plato, Albert Einstein, H. Poincare, Euclid, M. Faraday, Sigmund Freud, Josiah Royce, Karl F. Gauss, G. Y. Rainich, G. B. Riemann, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Graham, Ernest Rutherford, Arthur Haas, E. Schrodinger, Wm. R. Hamilton, C. S. Sherrington, Henry Head, Socrates, Werner Heisenberg, Arnold Sommerfeld, C. Judson Herrick, Oswald Veblen, E. V. Huntington, Wm. Alanson White, Smith Ely Jeluffe, Alfred N. Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Which Have Creatly Influenced My Enquiry
This System Is Dedicated ~ Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity,

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1:Looking at something changes it. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

2:The very act of observing disturbs the system. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

3:Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

4:Unless you stake your life, life will not be won. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

5:Science clears the fields on which technology can build. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

6:The 'path' comes into existence only when we observe it. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

7:The reality we can put into words is never reality itself. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

8:The one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

9:Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

10:Only a few know, how much one must know to know how little one knows. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

11:There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

12:My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

13:It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

14:Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

15:The more closely you look at one thing, the less closely can you see something else. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

16:Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
~ Werner Heisenberg,

17:What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

18:...separation of the observer from the phenomenon to be observed is no longer possible. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

19:Every word or concept, clear as it may seem to be, has only a limited range of applicability. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

20:Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

21:A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

22:Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

23:The more precise the measurement of position, the more imprecise the measurement of momentum, and vice versa. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

24:Whether we like it or not, modern ways are going to alter and in part destroy traditional customs and values. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

25:Thus, the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

26:"Uncertainty" is NOT "I don't know." It is "I can't know." "I am uncertain" does not mean "I could be certain." ~ Werner Heisenberg,

27:An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

28:What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. —Werner Heisenberg (1958)1 ~ Frans de Waal,

29:An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

30:The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

31:I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

32:Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves ~ Werner Heisenberg,

33:Natural science, does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

34:The Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

35:We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but
nature exposed to our method of questioning.
~ Werner Heisenberg,

36:Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

37:Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics ~ Werner Heisenberg,

38: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. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

39: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.
~ Werner Heisenberg,

40:After the conversations about Indian philosophy, some of the ideas of Quantum Physics that had seemed so crazy suddenly made much more sense. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

41:When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity ? And why turbulence ? I really believe he will have an answer for the first. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

42: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. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

43:[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. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

44:I believe that the existence of the classical "path" can be pregnantly formulated as follows: The "path" comes into existence only when we observe it. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

45:In general, scientific progress calls for no more than the absorption and elaboration of new ideas- and this is a call most scientists are happy to heed. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

46:We will have to abandon the philosophy of Democritus and the concept of elementary particles. We should accept instead the concept of elementary symmetries. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

47:Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

48:By getting to smaller and smaller units, we do not come to fundamental or indivisible units. But we do come to a point where further division has no meaning. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

49:In the strict formulation of the law of causality—if we know the present, we can calculate the future—it is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

50:Whenever we proceed from the known to the unkown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding' ~ Werner Heisenberg,

51:Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

52:My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

53:Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection though we can only speak of it in images and parables. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

54:The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

55: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. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

56:The discontinuous 'reduction of the wave packets' which cannot be derived from Schroedinger's equation is ... a consequence of the transition from the possible to the actual. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

57:In my paper the fact the XY was not equal to YX was very disagreeable to me. I felt this was the only point of difficulty in the whole scheme...and I was not able to solve it. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

58:The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

59: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. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

60:Since the measuring device has been constructed by the observer ... we have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
~ Werner Heisenberg, #index,

61:I am firmly convinced that we must never judge political movements by their aims, no matter how loudly proclaimed or how sincerely upheld, but only by the means they use to realize these aims. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

62:In classical physics, science started from the belief – or should one say, from the illusion? – that we could describe the world, or least parts of the world, without any reference to ourselves. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

63:Nature is made in such a way as to be able to be understood. Or perhaps I should put it-more correctly-the other way around, and say that we are made in such a way as to be able to understand Nature. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

64: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. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

65:The structure underlying the phenomena is not given by material objects like the atoms of Democritus but by the form that determines the material objects. The Ideas are more fundamental than the objects. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

66:The ontology of materialism rested upon the illusion that the kind of existence, the direct "actuality" of the world around us, can be extrapolated into the atomic range. This extrapolation is impossible, however. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

67:The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word understand. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

68:I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

69:The violent reaction on the recent development of modern physics can only be understood when one realises that here the foundations of physics have started moving; and that this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science ~ Werner Heisenberg,

70: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. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

71:Can quantum mechanics represent the fact that an electron finds itself approximately in a given place and that it moves approximately with a given velocity, and can we make these approximations so close that they do not cause experimental difficulties? ~ Werner Heisenberg,

72:Werner Heisenberg put it, “what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Heisenberg, a German physicist, made this observation regarding quantum mechanics, but it holds equally true for explorations of the animal ~ Frans de Waal,

73:Parece que en la naturaleza hay un cierto nivel de aleatoriedad o incertidumbre, que no se puede eliminar por muy buenas que sean las teorías. Eso se puede resumir en el Principio de Incertidumbre, formulado en 1927 por el científico alemán Werner Heisenberg. ~ Stephen Hawking,

74:Science no longer is in the position of observer of nature, but rather recognizes itself as part of the interplay between man and nature. The scientific method ... changes and transforms its object: the procedure can no longer keep its distance from the object. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

75:Where no guiding ideals are left to point the way, the scale of values disappears and with it the meaning of our deeds and sufferings, and at the end can lie only negation and despair. Religion is therefore the foundation of ethics, and ethics the presupposition of life. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

76:What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning. Our scientific work in physics consists in asking questions about nature in the language that we possess and trying to get an answer from experiment by the means that are at our disposal. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

77:It was about three o'clock at night when the final result of the calculation [which gave birth to quantum mechanics] lay before me ... At first I was deeply shaken ... I was so excited that I could not think of sleep. So I left the house ... and awaited the sunrise on top of a rock. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

78:Both matter and radiation possess a remarkable duality of character, as they sometimes exhibit the properties of waves, at other times those of particles. Now it is obvious that a thing cannot be a form of wave motion and composed of particles at the same time - the two concepts are too different ~ Werner Heisenberg,

79: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. Whenever we proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word 'understanding'.
~ Werner Heisenberg,

80: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. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

81: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. Whenever we
proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we
may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding’. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

82:Many people will tell you that an expert is someone who knows a great deal about the subject. To this I would object that one can never know much about any subject. I would much prefer the following definition: an expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in the subject, and how to avoid them. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

83:[The probability wave] meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of "potentia" in Aristoelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

84:I think that modern physics has definitely decided in favor of Plato. In fact the smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary sense; they are forms, ideas which can be expressed unambiguously only in mathematical language. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

85: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. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

86:Logging can also change the interaction of the threads and mask the problem. And non-optimised, “debug,” builds of your software can perform rather differently from the “release” builds. These are affectionately known as Heisenbugs, after the physicist Werner Heisenberg’s “observer effect” in quantum mechanics. The act of observing a system can alter its state. ~ Anonymous,

87:Modern physics has changed nothing in the great classical disciplines of, for instance, mechanics, optics, and heat. Only the conception of hitherto unexplored regions, formed prematurely from a knowledge of only certain parts of the world, has undergone a decisive transformation. This conception, however, is always decisive for the future course of research. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

88:You may object that by speaking of simplicity and beauty I am introducing aesthetic criteria of truth, and I frankly admit that I am strongly attracted by the simplicity and beauty of mathematical schemes which nature presents us. You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationship, which nature suddenly spreads out before us. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

89:Es gibt keinen Gott und Dirac ist sein Prophet. There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet. ~ Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, in a remark made during the Fifth Solvay International Conference (October 1927), after a discussion of the religious views of various physicists, at which all the participants laughed, including Dirac; as quoted in Teil und das Ganze (1969), by Werner Heisenberg, p. 119 ,

90:The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

91:Here the attention of the research workers is primarily directed to the problem of reconciling the claims of the special relativity theory with those of the quantum theory. The extraordinary advances made in this field by Dirac ... leave open the question whether it will be possible to satisfy the claims of the two theories without at the same time determining the Sommerfeld fine-structure constant. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

92:The physicist may be satisfied when he has the mathematical scheme and knows how to use for the interpretation of the experiments. But he has to speak about his results also to non-physicists who will not be satisfied unless some explanation is given in plain language. Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be the criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

93:I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments? ~ Werner Heisenberg,

94:Two and a half thousand years later, Zeno’s arrow paradox finally makes sense. The Eleatic School of philosophy, which Zeno brilliantly defended, was right. So was Werner Heisenberg when he said, “A path comes into existence only when you observe it.” There is neither time nor motion without life. Reality is not “there” with definite properties waiting to be discovered but actually comes into being depending upon the actions of the observer. ~ Robert Lanza,

95:The incomplete knowledge of a system must be an essential part of every formulation in quantum theory. Quantum theoretical laws must be of a statistical kind. To give an example: we know that the radium atom emits alpha-radiation. Quantum theory can give us an indication of the probability that the alpha-particle will leave the nucleus in unit time, but it cannot predict at what precise point in time the emission will occur, for this is uncertain in principle. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

96:If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty—by forms, I am referring to coherent systems of hypotheses, axioms, etc.—to forms that no one has previously encountered, we cannot help thinking that they are “true,” that they reveal a genuine feature of nature…. You must have felt this too: the almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of the relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

97:If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty - by forms I am referring to coherent systems of hypothesis, axioms, etc. - to forms that no one has previously encountered, we cannot help thinking that they are "true," that they reveal a genuine feature of nature... You must have felt this too: The almost frightening simplicity and wholeness of relationships which nature suddenly spreads out before us and for which none of us was in the least prepared. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

98:The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not of atoms. The physicist Werner Heisenberg declared that the universe is made of music, not of matter. And we believe that if you habitually expose yourself to toxic stories and music, you could wind up living in the wrong universe, where it's impossible to become the gorgeous genius you were born to be. That's why we implore you to nourish yourself with delicious, nutritious tales and tunes that inspire you to exercise your willpower for your highest good. ~ Rob Brezsny,

99: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. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

100:I suggest that there is a rationale that applies to the materialization of events through dreams that I believe was hinted at by Werner Heisenberg in his book Physics and Beyond, as a middle realm between hard objectivity and soft subjectivity. Heisenberg wrote about the mystical and the scientific experience of the world as being joined in some way. He said that somewhere between the object and the subject is a middle realm, a concept that is receiving increasing interest among physicists today. It appears to me that this middle realm is Jung's psychoid realm, the tertium quid. ~ Fred Alan Wolf,

101:Emotions frequently contaminate the data. Physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg said, “What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Scientific inquiry must be unbiased to generate objective and reliable data. Since paranormal researchers generally believe in the afterlife already (especially when investigating the spirit of a departed loved one), they are frequently not as objective as they should be. Too many researchers have already reached a conclusion before they start an investigation and do their best to skew their findings in the direction of that conclusion. ~ Zak Bagans,

102:In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I an now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking as simply part of an outmoded phase in the consciousness of mankind, a part we shall have to give up from now on, Thus in the course of my life I have repeatedly been compelled to ponder on the relationship of these two regions of though, for I have never been able to doubt the reality of that to which they point. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

103:Einstein's conception is closer to mine. His God is somehow involved in the immutable laws of nature. Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him. But as far as he is concerned there is no split between science and religion: the central order is part of the subjective as well as the objective realm, and this strikes me as being a far better starting point. ~ Wolfgang Pauli, in statements after the Solvay Conference of 1927, as quoted in Physics and Beyond (1971) by Werner Heisenberg,

104:If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli's, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamentally skeptical point of view. In reality however, behind this outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli's analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists. ~ Werner Heisenberg,

105:Es gibt keinen Gott und Dirac ist sein Prophet. (There is no God and Dirac is his Prophet.)

{A remark made during the Fifth Solvay International Conference (October 1927), after a discussion of the religious views of various physicists, at which all the participants laughed, including Dirac, as quoted in Teil und das Ganze (1969), by Werner Heisenberg, p. 119; it is an ironic play on the Muslim statement of faith, the Shahada, often translated: 'There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his Prophet.'} ~ Wolfgang Ernst Pauli,

106:To The Works Of:
Aristotle, Cassius J. Keyser, Eric T. Bell, G. W. Leibnitz, Eugen Bleuler, J. Locke, Niels Bohr, Jacques Loeb, George Boole, H. A. Lorentz, Max Born, Ernst Mach, Louis De Brogue, J. C. Maxwell, Georg Cantor, Adolf Meyer, Ernst Cassirer, Hermann Minkowsja, Charles M. Child, Isaac Newton, C. Darwin, Ivan Pavlov, Rene Descartes, Giuseppe Peano, P. A. M. Dirac, Max Planck, A. S. Eddington, Plato, Albert Einstein, H. Poincare, Euclid, M. Faraday, Sigmund Freud, Josiah Royce, Karl F. Gauss, G. Y. Rainich, G. B. Riemann, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Graham, Ernest Rutherford, Arthur Haas, E. Schrodinger, Wm. R. Hamilton, C. S. Sherrington, Henry Head, Socrates, Werner Heisenberg, Arnold Sommerfeld, C. Judson Herrick, Oswald Veblen, E. V. Huntington, Wm. Alanson White, Smith Ely Jeluffe, Alfred N. Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Which Have Creatly Influenced My Enquiry
This System Is Dedicated ~ Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity,

107:We thus arrive at the important result: Events that are simultaneous with reference to the embankment are not simultaneous with respect to the train,” said Einstein. The principle of relativity says that there is no way to decree that the embankment is “at rest” and the train “in motion.” We can say only that they are in motion relative to each other. So there is no “real” or “right” answer. There is no way to say that any two events are “absolutely” or “really” simultaneous.43 This is a simple insight, but also a radical one. It means that there is no absolute time. Instead, all moving reference frames have their own relative time. Although Einstein refrained from saying that this leap was as truly “revolutionary” as the one he made about light quanta, it did in fact transform science. “This was a change in the very foundation of physics, an unexpected and very radical change that required all the courage of a young and revolutionary genius,” noted Werner Heisenberg, who later contributed to a similar feat with his principle of quantum uncertainty. ~ Walter Isaacson,

108:when another German scientist, Werner Heisenberg, formulated his famous uncertainty principle. In order to predict the future position and velocity of a particle, one has to be able to measure its present position and velocity accurately. The obvious way to do this is to shine light on the particle. Some of the waves of light will be scattered by the particle and this will indicate its position. However, one will not be able to determine the position of the particle more accurately than the distance between the wave crests of light, so one needs to use light of a short wavelength in order to measure the position of the particle precisely. Now, by Planck’s quantum hypothesis, one cannot use an arbitrarily small amount of light; one has to use at least one quantum. This quantum will disturb the particle and change its velocity in a way that cannot be predicted. Moreover, the more accurately one measures the position, the shorter the wavelength of the light that one needs and hence the higher the energy of a single quantum. So the velocity of the particle will be disturbed by a larger amount. In other words, the more accurately you try to measure the position of the particle, the less accurately you can measure its speed, and vice versa. ~ Stephen Hawking,

109:To understand this new frontier, I will have to try to master one of the most difficult and counterintuitive theories ever recorded in the annals of science: quantum physics. Listen to those who have spent their lives immersed in this world and you will have a sense of the challenge we face. After making his groundbreaking discoveries in quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg recalled, "I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?" Einstein declared after one discovery, "If it is correct it signifies the end of science." Schrödinger was so shocked by the implications of what he'd cooked up that he admitted, "I do not like it and I am sorry I had anything to do with it." Nevertheless, quantum physics is now one of the most powerful and well-tested pieces of science on the books. Nothing has come close to pushing it off its pedestal as one of the great scientific achievements of the last century. So there is nothing to do but to dive headfirst into this uncertain world. Feynman has some good advice for me as I embark on my quest: "I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that. ~ Marcus du Sautoy,

110:If we are honest — and scientists have to be — we must admit that religion is a jumble of false assertions, with no basis in reality. The very idea of God is a product of the human imagination. It is quite understandable why primitive people, who were so much more exposed to the overpowering forces of nature than we are today, should have personified these forces in fear and trembling. But nowadays, when we understand so many natural processes, we have no need for such solutions. I can't for the life of me see how the postulate of an Almighty God helps us in any way. What I do see is that this assumption leads to such unproductive questions as why God allows so much misery and injustice, the exploitation of the poor by the rich and all the other horrors He might have prevented. If religion is still being taught, it is by no means because its ideas still convince us, but simply because some of us want to keep the lower classes quiet. Quiet people are much easier to govern than clamorous and dissatisfied ones. They are also much easier to exploit. Religion is a kind of opium that allows a nation to lull itself into wishful dreams and so forget the injustices that are being perpetrated against the people. Hence the close alliance between those two great political forces, the State and the Church. Both need the illusion that a kindly God rewards — in heaven if not on earth — all those who have not risen up against injustice, who have done their duty quietly and uncomplainingly. That is precisely why the honest assertion that God is a mere product of the human imagination is branded as the worst of all mortal sins. ~ Paul Dirac, Remarks made during the Fifth Solvay International Conference (October 1927), as quoted in Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (1971) by Werner Heisenberg, pp. 85-86; these comments prompted the famous remark later in the day by Wolfgang Pauli: "Well, our friend Dirac, too, has a religion, and its guiding principle is "God does not exist and Dirac is His prophet." Variant translations and paraphrases of that comment are listed in the "Quotes about Dirac" section below.,

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