Max Born Quotes

41 Sourced Quotes

It is true that many scientists are not philosophically minded and have hitherto shown much skill and ingenuity but little wisdom.

Max Born
All attempts to adapt our ethical code to our situation in the technological age have failed.

Max Born
The difficulty involved is that 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
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.

Max Born
Faith, imagination and intuition are decisive factors in the progress of science as in any other human activity.

Max Born
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.

Max Born
Physicists are very broad-minded in this respect; they will continue using obsolete expressions like ether, and no harm is done. For them a matter of terminology is not serious until a new quantitative law is involved.

Max Born
Hope is a word one is unlikely to find in the literature of physics.

Max Born
The collective enterprise of practical science consists in the end of individuals and cannot thrive without their devotion. But devotion does not suffice; nothing great can be achieved without the elementary curiosity of the philosopher.

Max Born
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
The satisfaction of the noble curiosity of the scholar is only one aspect of research. Science is also — and many say predominantly — a collective effort to obtain power over the forces of nature in the interest of human life.

Max Born