Werner Heisenberg Quotes

The electron, as it leaves the atom, crystallises out of Schrodinger's mist like a genie emerging from his bottle.

Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.

We had to understand things like why the top quark was so heavy and the electron is so light. The Higgs is a big, important step.

I spent most of my career doing high-energy physics, quarks, dark matter, string theory and so on.

The world of the quark has everything to do with a jaguar circling in the night.

I read a lot of science books - I love cosmology, quantum theory, particle physics. So my idea of a great read would probably put you directly into a coma.

I would hope that the publicity around the Higgs boson would increase the public awareness of physics and cosmology.

There was a time when we wanted to be told what an electron is. The question was never answered. No familiar conceptions can be woven around the electron; it belongs to the waiting list.

Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.

Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

Subatomic particles do not exist but rather show 'tendencies to exist', and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show 'tendencies to occur'.

The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist.

Anyone who can contemplate quantum mechanics without getting dizzy hasn't understood it.

I think I can safely say that nobody understands Quantum Mechanics.

We do not understand much of anything, from... the "big bang" , all the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell. We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the centuries ahead.

Newtonian physics runs into problems at the subatomic level. Down there--in the land of hadrons, quarks, and Schrödinger's cat--things gent freaky. The cool rationality of Isaac Newton gives way to the bizarre unpredictability of Lewis Carroll.

I did my masters in elementary particles. But the foundations of elementary particles is quantum theory and there were too many conceptual problems around quantum theory that I couldn't live with. So I decided I was going to work on the foundations of quantum theory. That's what I did my Ph.D on.

I often feel a discomfort, a kind of embarrassment, when I explain elementary-particle physics to laypeople. It all seems so arbitrary - the ridiculous collection of fundamental particles, the lack of pattern to their masses.

If the experimental physicist has already done a great deal of work in this field, nevertheless the theoretical physicist has still hardly begun to evaluate the experimental material which may lead him to conclusions about the structure of the atom.

Among the questions we have in mind: dark matter, antimatter, and matter symmetry.

In the lab, we could not see or physically describe the mathematical objects that we called quarks, which we suspected were the key to unlocking the dynamics of the strong force that binds together the clump of protons and neutrons at the center of the atom.

Physicists are interested in measuring neutrino properties because they tell us about the structure of the Standard Model, the well-tested theory that describes matter's most basic elements and interactions.

The whole edifice of modern physics is built up on the fundamental hypothesis of the atomic or molecular constitution of matter.

I had set out to disprove quantum field theory - and the opposite occurred! I was shocked.