Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that the complexities of the universe surpass our understanding and imagination.
Werner Heisenberg's quote highlights the limitations of human thought in comprehending the vastness and intricacies of the universe. It implies that the reality of existence is far more complicated than our current understanding and even our ability to conceive of it, encouraging a sense of humility regarding our knowledge of the cosmos.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the limits of human understanding in a science class.
Although the theory of relativity makes the greatest of demands on the ability for abstract thought, still it fulfills the traditional requirements of science insofar as it permits a division of the world into subject and object (observer and observed) and, hence, a clear formulation of the law of causality.
It was about three o'clock at night when the final result of the calculation [which gave birth to quantum mechanics] lay before me ... At first I was deeply shaken ... I was so excited that I could not think of sleep. So I left the house ... and awaited the sunrise on top of a rock.
It is generally believed that our science is empirical and that we draw our concepts and our mathematical constructs from the empirical data. If this were the whole truth, we should, when entering into a new field, introduce only such quantities as can directly be observed, and formulate natural laws only by means of these quantities.
When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity ? And why turbulence ? I really believe he will have an answer for the first.
The end of the First World War had thrown Germany's youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger ones drew together in larger and smaller groups to blaze new paths or, at least, to discover a new star to steer by.
The Same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
The stress laid on upward social mobility in the United States has tended to obscure the fact that there can be more than one kind of mobility and more than one direction in which it can go. There can be ethical mobility as well as financial, and it can go down as well as up.
He who wishes to revenge injuries by reciprocal hatred will live in misery. But he who endeavors to drive away hatred by means of love, fights with pleasure and confidence; he resists equally one or many men, and scarcely needs at all the help of fortune. Those whom he conquers yield joyfully
If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog or a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication and anything else that can plausibly be considered morally significant.
As wave is driven by wave_x000D_ And each, pursued, pursues the wave ahead,_x000D_ So time flies on and follows, flies, and follows,_x000D_ Always, for ever and new. What was before_x000D_ Is left behind; what never was is now;_x000D_ And every passing moment is renewed.
Ask her what she craved, and she'd get a little frantic about things like books, the woods, music. Plants and the seasons. Also freedom. Not being bought and sold by some idiot employer, not having the moments of her days valued in fractions of a dollar by somebody other than herself.
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