Werner Heisenberg: The Physicist's Conception of Nature

Herbert Hörz

Vinícius Carvalho da Silva, Judikael Castelo Branco

In the present article we analyze the understanding and the use of the Kantian philosophy by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize of Physics of 1932, formulator of the principle of uncertainty. Heisenberg seems to adopt a neo-Kantian understanding of the nature of science, according to which science would not deal with the real itself, but only with the way it appears, which inescapably depends on the interaction between the subject and the object of knowledge. However, in spite of this conception, Heisenberg considers that the Kantian definitions of "space", "time" and "causality" are not compatible with the developments of the quantum mechanics. In this opportunity we will see more carefully the conception of science and the problem of causality.

Vinícius Carvalho da Silva

In this work we seek to investigate how the german physicist philosopher Werner Heisenberg understood the importance of cartesian philosophy in the construction of scientific thought of modernity. For Heisenberg, the central element of Descartes' great influence in the natural sciences is the separation of "God," "man," and "world." The physicist philosopher analyzes this separation and proposes that from quantum mechanics, the split between subject and object, man and nature, has become unsustainable.

Johnny Hooyberghs

You have probably heard of quantum computing or quantum in general; otherwise, you would not have bought this book. Quantum is a concept from the world of physics, where it goes by the name quantum mechanics. Its development started in the beginning of the 20th century by well-known physicists like Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Richard Feynman, and many others. Quantum mechanics studies the behavior and properties of nature on an atomic scale. Thanks to the discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics, we can leverage these discoveries and create a new tenor in computer science.