Werner Heisenberg

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and who manages to avoid them.”

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”

“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.”

“The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.”

“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.”

“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

“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.”

“If nature leads us to mathematical forms of great simplicity and beauty... we cannot help thinking that they are 'true,' that they reveal a genuine feature of nature.”

“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.”

“In classical physics, science started from the belief — or should one say, from the illusion? — that we could describe the world... without any reference to ourselves.”

“Every tool carries with it the spirit by which it has been created.”