Reality and Its Order

Werner Heisenberg (born 1901 in Würzburg/Germany - died 1976 in München) is one of the leading scientists of the 20th century, inventor of quantum mechanics and Nobel Prize Winner. Heisenberg studied physics with Arnold Sommerfeld in Munich and with Max Born in Göttingen and worked as assistant to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. On the island of Helgoland in 1925, he made the breakthrough to a theory of the atom, dubbed Quantum Mechanics. In 1927, he found that in the atomic world, there are limits to our knowledge, which he specified as the Uncertainty Relation. In 1933, he received the Nobel Prize  as  “creator of the theory of Quantum Mechanics”. From 1945, he was director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics and president of the Humboldt Foundation.Konrad Kleinknecht (born 1940 in Ravensburg) is professor of experimental Physics at the Johannes-Gutenberg University of Mainz and member of the excellence cluster “Universe” at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He has worked at the universities of Heidelberg, Dortmund, Mainz and Munich, at the European Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics CERN in Geneva/Switzerland, Caltech in Pasadena and Fermilab near Chicago and gave the Loeb lectures at Harvard.

• Preface of the Editor.- Introduction by Helmut Rechenberg.- Section I: The Diverse Areas of Reality.- Language.- Order.- Section II: The Domain of Reality in Goethe's View.- (Classical) Physics.- Chemistry.- Organic Life.- Consciousness.- Symbol and Gestalt.- The Creative Forces.- Section III: Commentary by Ernst Peter Fischer.