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Max Born Quotes

Total quotes: 10
“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
“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
“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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