120 Quotes by Werner Heisenberg

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.

The Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.

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.

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.

Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.

The basic idea is to shove all fundamental difficulties onto the neutron and to do quantum mechanics in the nucleus.

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.

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.

Nature allows only experimental situations to occur which can be described within the framework of the formalism of quantum mechanics