An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical.

There are some things so serious that you have to laugh at them.

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.

A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself.

Stop telling God what to do with his dice.

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself it’s own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.

We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.

The very nature of the quantum theory … forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively.

Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

Your theory is crazy, but it’s not crazy enough to be true.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.

I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a. subjective side won’t get us very far.

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

Werner Heisenberg

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

Werner Heisenberg

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

There are things that are so serious that you can only joke about them.

Werner Heisenberg

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 neighboring 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

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

Werner Heisenberg

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

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.

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.

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.

The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.

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

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.

Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.

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.

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.

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.

Only a few know, how much one must know, to know how little one knows.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

We may remark at this point that modern physics is in some way extremely near to the doctrines of Heraclitus. If we replace the word ‘fire’ by the word ‘energy’ we can almost repeat his statements word for word from our modern point of view. Energy is in fact the substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made, and energy is that which moves. Energy is a substance, since its total amount does not change, and the elementary particles can actually be made from this substance as is seen in many experiments on the creation of elementary particles. Energy can be changed into motion, into heat, into light and into tension. Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world.

The real trouble is this: giving expression to thought by the observable medium of words is like the work of the silkworm. In being made into silk, the material achieves its value. But in the light of day it stiffens; it becomes something alien, no longer malleable. True, we can then more easily and freely recall the same thought, but perhaps we can never experience it again in its original freshness.

Our [Western] science has cut itself off from an adequate understanding of the Subject of Cognizance, of the mind. This is precisely the point where our present way of thinking needs to be amended, perhaps by a bit of blood-transfusion from Eastern thought.

Bohr‘s standpoint, that a space-time description is impossible, I reject a limine. Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist only of science. The aim of atomic research is to fit our empirical knowledge concerning it into our other thinking. All of this other thinking, so far as it concerns the outer world, is active in space and time. If it cannot be fitted into space and time, then it fails in its whole aim and one does not know what purpose it really serves.

It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic.

We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge.

Briefly summarizing, we can express the proposed law thus: consciousness is bound up with learning in organic substance; organic competence is unconscious. Still more briefly, and put in a form which is admittedly rather obscure and open to misunderstanding: Becoming is conscious, being unconscious.

What is this ‘I’? If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by ‘I’ is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones. Less and less important will become the fact that, while living your new life, you still recollect the old one. ‘The youth that was I’, you may come to speak of him in the third person, indeed the protagonist of the novel you are reading is probably nearer to your heart, certainly more intensely alive and better known to you. Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death. And even if a skilled hypnotist succeeded in blotting out entirely all your earlier reminiscences, you would not find that he had killed you. In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.

If we were organisms so sensitive that a single atom, or even a few atoms, could make a perceptible impression on our senses – Heavens, what would life be like! To stress one point: an organism of that kind would most certainly not be capable of developing the kind of orderly thought which, after passing through a long sequence of earlier stages, ultimately results in forming, among many other ideas, the idea of an atom.

I consider it extremely doubtful whether the happiness of the human race has been enhanced by the technical and industrial developments that followed in the wake of rapidly progressing natural science.

An isolated system or a system in a uniform environment (which for the present consideration we do best to include as a part of the system we contemplate) increases its entropy and more or less rapidly approaches the inert state of maximum entropy. We now recognize this fundamental law of physics to be just the natural tendency of things to approach the chaotic state (the same tendency that the books of a library or the piles of papers and manuscripts on a writing desk display) unless we obviate it. (The analogue of irregular heat motion, in this case, is our handling those objects now and again without troubling to put them back in their proper places.)

To the physicist – but only to him – I could hope to make my view clearer by saying: The living organism seems to be a macroscopic system which in part of its behaviour approaches to that purely mechanical (as contrasted with thermodynamical) conduct to which all systems tend, as the temperature approaches the absolute zero and the molecular disorder is removed.

I remember an interesting little paper by Max Planck on the topic ‘The Dynamical and the Statistical Type of Law’ (‘Dynamische und Statistische Gesetzmässigkeit’). The distinction is precisely the one we have here labelled as ‘order from order’ and ‘order from disorder’.

To give the statement life and color, let me anticipate what will be explained in much more detail later, namely, that the most essential part of a living cell – the chromosome fiber – may suitably be called an aperiodic crystal.

By the way, I never realized that to be nonbelieving, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were.

The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information… [but] it cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. So, in brief, we do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us… the scientific worldview contains of itself… not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination.

ORDER BASED ON ORDER

Contrary to the common belief, the regular course of events, governed by the laws of physics, is never the consequence of one well-ordered configuration of atoms – not unless that configuration of atoms repeats itself a great number of times, either as in the periodic crystal or as in a liquid or in a gas composed of a great number of identical molecules.

All the physical and chemical laws that are known to play an important part in the life of organisms are of this statistical kind; any other kind of lawfulness and orderliness that one might think of is being perpetually disturbed and made inoperative by the unceasing heat motion of the atoms.

Now, I think, few words more are needed to disclose the point of resemblance between a clockwork and an organism. It is simply and solely that the latter also hinges upon a solid – the aperiodic crystal forming the hereditary substance, largely withdrawn from the disorder of heat motion.

You see from this again that an organism must have a comparatively gross structure in order to enjoy the benefit of fairly accurate laws.

Entropy taken with a negative sign’, which by the way is not my invention. It happens to be precisely the thing on which Boltzmann’s original argument turned.

The reason for this was not that the subject was simple enough to be explained without mathematics, but rather that it was much too involved to be fully accessible to mathematics.

The task is … not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.

Schrödinger’s

It was said by Epicurus, and he was probably right, that all philosophy takes its origin from philosophical wonder. The man who has never at any time felt consciously struck by the extreme strangeness and oddity of the situation in which we are involved, we know not how, is a man with no affinity for philosophy – and has, by the way, little cause to worry. The unphilosophical and philosophical attitudes can be very sharply distinguished (with scarcely any intermediate forms) by the fact that the first accepts everything that happens as regards its general form, and finds occasion for surprise only in that special content by which something that happens here today differs from what happened there yesterday; whereas for the second, it is precisely the common features of all experience, such as characterise everything we encounter, which are the primary and most profound occasion for astonishment; indeed, one might almost say that it is the fact that anything is experienced and encounter at all.

What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this ‘someone else’ really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father’s father… thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference – the difference between you and someone else – when objectively what is there is the same?

The non-physicist finds it hard to believe that really the ordinary laws of physics, which he regards as the prototype of inviolable precision, should be based on the statistical tendency of matter to go over into disorder.

Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.

What then is that precious something contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happening – call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy – or, as you may say, produces positive entropy – and thus tends to approach the dangerous state of maximum entropy, which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy – which is something very positive as we shall immediately see. What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.

There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind.

No Self stands alone. Behind it stretches an immense chain of physical and – as a special class within the whole – mental events, to which it belongs as a reacting member and which it carries on. Through the condition at any moment of its somatic, especially its cerebral system, and through education, and tradition, by word, by writing, by monument, by manners, by a way of life, by a newly shaped environment… by so much that a thousand words would not exhaust it, by all that, I say, the Self is not so much linked with what happened to its ancestors, it is not so much the product, and merely the product, of all that, but rather, in the strictest sense of the word, the SAME THING as all that: the strict, direct continuation of it, just as the Self aged fifty is the continuation of the Self aged forty.

How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism. The Greek word () means change or exchange. Exchange of what?

We are thus faced with the following question: Why should an organ like our brain, with the sensorial system attached to it, of necessity consist of an enormous number of atoms, in order that its physically changing state should be in close and intimate correspondence with a highly developed thought?

Like so many works that have had a great impact on human thinking, it makes points that, once they are grasped, have a ring of almost self-evident truth; yet they are still blindly ignored by a disconcertingly large proportion of people who should know better.

Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.

Amateurs seek the sun. Get eaten. Power stays in the shadows.

Lewis Strauss

They won’t fear it until they understand it. And they won’t understand it until they’ve used it. Theory will take you only so far.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

When they’ve punished you enough, they’ll serve you salmon and potato salad, make speeches, give you a medal, and pat you in the back telling all is forgiven. Just remember, it won’t be for you… it would be for them.

Albert Einstein

I don’t know if we can be trusted with such a weapon. But I know the Nazis can’t.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

You don’t get to commit sin, and then ask all of us to feel sorry for you when there are consequences.

Kitty Oppenheimer

Genius is no guarantee of wisdom. How could this man who saw so much be so blind?

Lewis Strauss

You drop a bomb, and it falls on the just and the unjust. I don’t wish the culmination of three centuries of physics to be a weapon of mass destruction.

Isidor Rabi

Algebra’s like sheet music, the important thing isn’t can you read music, it’s can you hear it. Can you hear the music, Robert?

Niels Bohr

You think because you let them tar and feather you that the world will forgive you? They won’t.

Kitty Oppenheimer

You can’t lift the stone without being ready for the snake that’s revealed.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

We have to make the politicians understand, this isn’t a new weapon, it is a new world.

Niels Bohr

You are the man who gave them the power to destroy themselves. And the world is not prepared.

Niels Bohr

Well, if they do, they’d cool, then collapse. In fact, the bigger the star, the more violent its demise. Their gravity gets so concentrated, it swallows everything.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

We have to make the politicians understand this isn’t a new weapon. It’s a new world. I’ll be out there doing what I can but you, you are an American Prometheus. The man who gave them the power to destroy themselves. And they’ll respect that. And your works really begins soon.

Niels Bohr

Don’t alienate the only people in the world that understand what you do. One day you may need them.

Jean Tatlock