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Max Born Quotes

Total quotes: 26
“To present a scientific subject in an attractive and stimulating manner is an artistic task, similar to that of a novelist or even a dramatic writer. The same holds for writing textbooks.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Science, Novels, Textbooks, Writing
“It is true that many scientists are not philosophically minded and have hitherto shown much skill and ingenuity but little wisdom.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Science, Philosophy, Ingenuity, Wisdom
“Those who say that the study of science makes a man an atheist, must be rather silly people.”
— Max Born
Tagged: atheism, Science
“No language which lends itself to visualizability can describe the quantum jumps.”
— Max Born
“The continuity of our science has not been affected by all these turbulent happenings, as the older theories have always been included as limiting cases in the new ones.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Science, Theory, Adversity
“Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Intellect, Reason, Possible, impossible
“The belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Truth, Evil, Moral Certainty
“The human race has today the means for annihilating itself—either in a fit of complete lunacy, i.e., in a big war...or by the careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.”
— Max Born
Tagged: human race, Nuclear Annihilation, Lunacy
“But I believe that there is no philosophical high-road in science, with epistemological signposts. No, we are in a jungle and find our way by trial and error, building our road behind us as we proceed. We do not find signposts at cross-roads, but our own scouts erect them, to help the rest.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Science
“We have reached the end of our journey into the depths of matter. We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe…: all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Matter, dance
“Truth is what the scientist aims at. He finds nothing at rest, nothing enduring, in the universe. Not everything is knowable, still less predictable. But the mind of man is capable of grasping and understanding at least a part of Creation; amid the flight of phenomena stands the immutable pole of law.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Truth, Creation, physics, Phenomena
“His [Erwin Schrödinger's] private life seemed strange to bourgeois people like ourselves. But all this does not matter. He was a most lovable person, independent, amusing, temperamental, kind and generous, and he had a most perfect and efficient brain.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Erwin Schrödinger, Bourgeois
“If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Intellect, God, Predictive Behavior
“I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy. It has revolutionized fundamental concepts, e.g., about space and time (relativity), about causality (quantum theory), and about substance and matter (atomistics). It has taught us new methods of thinking (complementarity), which are applicable far beyond physics.”
— Max Born
Tagged: physics, Philosophy, Quantum Physics
“Something which is against natural laws seems to me rather out of the question because it would be a depressive idea about God. It would make God smaller than he must be assumed. When he stated that these laws hold, then they hold, and he wouldn't make exceptions. This is too human an idea. Humans do such things, but not God.”
— Max Born, Quantum Bliss
Tagged: Natural, Unnatural, God
“But in practical affairs, particularly in politics, men are needed who combine human experience and interest in human relations with a knowledge of science and technology. Moreover, they must be men of action and not contemplation. I have the impression that no method of education can produce people with all the qualities required. I am haunted by the idea that this break in human civilization, caused by the discovery of the scientific method, may be irreparable.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Scientific Method
“It is odd to think that there is a word for something which, strictly speaking, does not exist, namely, ‘rest.’ We distinguish between living and dead matter; between moving bodies and bodies at rest. This is a primitive point of view. What seems dead, a stone or the proverbial ‘door-nail,’ say, is actually forever in motion. We have merely become accustomed to judge by outward appearances; by the deceptive impressions we get through our senses.”
— Max Born
Tagged: senses, appearances
“Can we call something with which the concepts of position and motion cannot be associated in the usual way, a thing, or a particle? And if not, what is the reality which our theory has been invented to describe?
 The answer to this is no longer physics, but philosophy.…Here I will only say that I am emphatically in favour of the retention of the particle idea. Naturally, it is necessary to redefine what is meant. For this, well-developed concepts are available which appear in mathematics under the name of invariants in transformations. Every object that we perceive appears in innumerable aspects. The concept of the object is the invariant of all these aspects. From this point of view, the present universally used system of concepts in which particles and waves appear simultaneously, can be completely justified. The latest research on nuclei and elementary particles has led us, however, to limits beyond which this system of concepts itself does not appear to suffice. The lesson to be learned from what I have told of the origin of quantum mechanics is that probable refinements of mathematical methods will not suffice to produce a satisfactory theory, but that somewhere in our doctrine is hidden a concept, unjustified by experience, which we must eliminate to open up the road.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Particle Physics, Mathematics
“There are metaphysical problems, which cannot be disposed of by declaring them meaningless. For, as I have repeatedly said, they are ‘beyond physics’ indeed and demand an act of faith. We have to accept this fact to be honest. There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that 'belief' must be discarded and replaced by "the scientific method.”
— Max Born
Tagged: physics, Metaphysics, Belief, Scientific Method
“In combination with other infernal contraptions, like rockets to deliver bombs at large distances, chemical, biological and radioactive poisons, such a war must mean a degree of human suffering and degradation which is beyond the power of imagination. No country would be immune, but those with highly developed industry would suffer most. It is very doubtful whether our technological civilization would survive such a catastrophe.

One may be inclined to regard this as no great loss, but as a just punishment for its shortcomings and sins: the lack of productive genius in art and literature, the neglect of the moral teachings of religion and philosophy, the slowness to abandon outdated political conceptions, like national sovereignty. Yet we are all involved in this tragedy, and the instinct of self-preservation, the love of our children, makes us think about a way of salvation.”
— Max Born
Tagged: bombs, Radiation, Sovereignty, self-preservation, Warfare, weapons
“One would have to have been brought up in the ‘spirit of militarism’ to understand the difference between Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the one hand, and Auschwitz and Belsen on the other. The usual reasoning is the following: the former case is one of warfare, the latter of cold-blooded slaughter. But the plain truth is that the people involved are in both instances nonparticipants, defenseless old people, women, and children, whose annihilation is supposed to achieve some political or military objective.… I am certain that the human race is doomed, unless its instinctive detestation of atrocities gains the upper hand over the artificially constructed judgment of reason.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Auschwitz
“I must give some attention to the delicate question of religion, on which I have touched already. In my father's generation this question still was discussed with passion. Since then a sort of truce has existed in the countries of the West, while in the communist states of the East atheism has been made into the State religion. It is not advisable to blow on the embers of such controversies. But as I am talking about the limitations of our physical world picture I cannot but say that I do not believe in transgressions of the laws of nature. As these laws are of a statistical nature, and therefore allow deviations from the norm, I must define more clearly what I mean. The statistical deviations themselves obey certain laws. The miraculous events of religious tradition, however, are of a different kind, they lie on a different plane altogether; they are meant to prove something lying entirely beyond scientific consideration, such as the power of prayer, the intervention of divine power for or against certain men or nations.”
— Max Born
Tagged: West, east, Science, Communism, Religion, Laws of Nature
“America has grown by expansion in a practical vacuum; the pioneers of the West had to overcome terrific natural obstacles, but negligible human resistance. The Russia of today had to conquer not only natural but human difficulties: she had to break up the rotten system of the Czars and to assimilate backward Asiatic tribes; now she has set herself the task of bringing her brand of modernization to the ancient civilizations of the Far East. For this purpose it is indispensable to have a well-defined doctrine full of slogans, which appeals to the needs and instincts of the poverty-stricken masses. Thus one understands the power which Marx's philosophy has gained in the East.

What can we scientists do in this conflict? We can join the spiritual, religious, philosophical forces, which reject war on ethical grounds. We can even attack the ideological foundations of the conflict itself. For science is not only the basis of technology but also the material for a sound philosophy.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Philosophy, Science, Conflict, Ethics, Marx, Poverty, Czars, America, Russia, West
“The ultimate origin of the difficulty lies in the fact (or philosophical principle) that we are compelled to use the words of common language when we wish to describe a phenomenon, not by logical or mathematical analysis, but by a picture appealing to the imagination. Common language has grown by everyday experience and can never surpass these limits. Classical physics has restricted itself to the use of concepts of this kind; by analyzing visible motions it has developed two ways of representing them by elementary processes; moving particles and waves. There is no other way of giving a pictorial description of motions—we have to apply it even in the region of atomic processes, where classical physics breaks down.”
— Max Born
Tagged: physics, Logic, Imagination
“The dance of atoms, electrons and nuclei, which in all its fury is subject to God's eternal laws, has been entangled with another restless Universe which may well be the Devil's: the human struggle for power and domination, which eventually becomes history. My optimistic enthusiasm about the disinterested search for truth has been severely shaken. I wonder at my simplemindedness when I re-read what I said on the modern fulfillment of the alchemist’s dream: ‘Now however, the motive is not the lust for gold, cloaked by the mystery of magic arts, but the scientists' pure curiosity. For it is clear from the beginning that we may not expect wealth, too.’ Gold means power, power to rule and to have a big share in the riches of this world. Modern alchemy is even a short-cut to this end, it provides power directly; a power to dominate and to threaten and hurt on a scale never heard of before. And this power we have actually seen displayed in ruthless acts of warfare, in the devastation of whole cities and the destruction of their population.”
— Max Born
Tagged: God, devil, Good, Evil, Alchemy, Power
“During my span of life science has become a matter of public concern and the l'art pour l'art standpoint of my youth is now obsolete. Science has become an integral and most important part of our civilization, and scientific work means contributing to its development. Science in our technical age has social, economic, and political functions, and however remote one's own work is from technical application it is a link in the chain of actions and decisions which determine the fate of the human race. I realized this aspect of science in its full impact only after Hiroshima.”
— Max Born
Tagged: Art, Science, Hiroshima
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