Max Born - Collected Quotes

"The difficulty involved in the proper and adequate means of describing changes in continuous deformable bodies is the method of differential equations. […] They express mathematically the physical concept of contiguous action." (Max Born, "Einstein's Theory of Relativity", 1920)

"It is natural that a man should consider the work of his hands or his brain to be useful and important. Therefore nobody will object to an ardent experimentalist boasting of his measurements and rather looking down on the 'paper and ink' physics of his theoretical friend, who on his part is proud of his lofty ideas and despises the dirty fingers of the other." (Max Born, " Experiment and Theory in Physics", 1943)

"The conception of chance enters in the very first steps of scientific activity in virtue of the fact that no observation is absolutely correct. I think chance is a more fundamental conception that causality; for whether in a concrete case, a cause-effect relation holds or not can only be judged by applying the laws of chance to the observation." (Max Born, 1949)

"When a scientific theory is firmly established and confirmed, it changes its character and becomes a part of the metaphysical background of the age: a doctrine is transformed into a dogma." (Max Born, "Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance", 1949)

"All great discoveries in experimental physics have been due to the intuition of men who made free use of models, which were for them not products of the imagination, but representatives of real things." (Max Born, "Physical Reality", Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 3 (11),1953)

"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, "The Statistical Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics", [Nobel lecture] 1954)

"[...] if we can never actually determine more than one of the two properties (possession of a definite position and of a definite momentum), and if when one is determined we-can make no assertion at all about the other property for the same moment, so far as our experiment goes, then we are not justified in concluding that the 'thing' under examination can actually be described as a particle in the usual sense of the term." (Max Born, "Atomic Physics", 1957)

"Physics is in the nature of the case indeterminate, and therefore the affair of statistics." (Max Born, "Atomic Physics", 1957)

"The ultimate origin of the difficulty lies in the fact (or philosophical principle) that we are compelled to use 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 wav of giving a pictorial description of motions - we have to apply it even in the region of atomic process, where classical physics break down." (Max Born, "Atomic Physics", 1957)

"[...] the whole course of events is determined by the laws of probability; to a state in space there corresponds a definite probability, which is given by the de Brogile wave associated with the state." (Max Born, "Atomic Physics", 1957)

"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, "Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance", 1964)

"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, "Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance", 1964)

"Science is not formal logic - it needs the free play of the mind in as great a degree as any other creative art. It is true that this is a gift which can hardly be taught, but its growth can be encouraged in those who already possess it." (Max Born)