If the lecture is good, then everything is too smooth. That's the same in music: if the performance is too good, you really don't enjoy it, because it just goes by, and you can never penetrate into the heart of it. Sometimes a poor performance is better for enjoyment, because you can look at those things that were wrong and analyze them.
Interpretation
Enjoyment often comes from imperfections rather than perfection.
Heisenberg's quote suggests that in both lectures and musical performances, too much perfection can lead to a lack of engagement or enjoyment. When something is overly polished, it may become difficult to connect with it on a deeper emotional level. On the other hand, flaws and imperfections allow for a more interactive and analytical experience, enabling a greater appreciation of the entire performance or lecture.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the importance of authenticity in art during a lecture.
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.
Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't.
It is better to be wise, and not to seem so, than to seem wise, and not be so; yet men, for the most part, desire the contrary.
We must not only obtain Wisdom: we must enjoy her.
While waiting for a Moses to lead us into the promised land, we have forgotten how to walk.
Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.
I, also, would like to look and smile, sit and walk like that, so free, so worthy, so restrained, so candid, so childlike and mysterious. A man only looks and walks like that when he has conquered his Self. I also will conquer my Self.
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