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’
The reality we can put into words is never reality itself.
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.
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.
The one who insists on never uttering an error must remain silent.
Whether we electrons, light quanta, benzol molecules, or stones, we shall always come up against these two characteristics, the corpuscular and the undular.
My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.
Every experiment destroys some of the knowledge of the system which was obtained by previous experiments.
It will never be possible by pure reason to arrive at some absolute truth.
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.
The ‘path’ comes into existence only when we observe it.
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.
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.
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?
The very act of observing disturbs the system.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that the discovery of antimatter was perhaps the biggest jump of all the big jumps in physics in our century.