Max Planck Quotes

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Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of them without any practical purpose whatsoever in view.

Max Planck
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Max Planck
Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.

Max Planck
We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.

Max Planck
Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

Max Planck
Physics would occupy an exceptional position among all the other sciences if it did not recognize the rule that the most far-reaching and valuable results of investigation can only be obtained by following a road leading to a goal which is theoretically unobtainable. This goal is the apprehension of true reality.

Max Planck
Religion belongs to that realm that is inviolable before the law of causation and therefore closed to science.

Max Planck
Physic, it may be urged, is solely concerned with the objects and events of inanimate nature, while a general philosophy, if it is to be at all satisfactory, must embrace the whole of physical and intellectual life and must deal with questions of the soul, including the highest problems of ethics.

Max Planck
Ever since the observation of nature has existed, it has held a vague notion of its ultimate goal as the composition of the colorful multiplicity of phenomena in a uniform system, where possible, in a single formula.

Max Planck
A process which in no manner can be completely reversed I called a "natural" one. The term for it in universal use today is: "Irreversible."

Max Planck
Since Galileo's time, physics has achieved its greatest success by rejecting all teleological methods.

Max Planck
Thus from the outset we can be quite clear about one very important fact, namely, that the validity of the law of causation for the world of reality is a question that cannot be decided on grounds of abstract reasoning.

Max Planck
Nothing is more interesting to the true theorist than a fact which directly contradicts a theory generally accepted up to that time, for this is his particular work.

Max Planck
Conscientiousness and truth are as necessary in research in pure science as in practical life.

Max Planck
It goes without saying that the laws of nature are in themselves independent of the properties of the instruments with which they are measured. Therefore in every observation of natural phenomena we must remember the principle that the reliability of the measuring apparatus must always play an important role.

Max Planck
No science can rest its foundation on the dependability of single human individuals.

Max Planck
Every measurement first acquires its meaning for physical science through the significance which a theory gives it.

Max Planck
Either the quantum of action was a fictional quantity, then the whole deduction of the radiation law was in the main illusionary and represented nothing more than an empty nonsignificant play on formulae, or the derivation of the radiation law was based on sound physical conception.

Max Planck
It is wholly absurd to maintain that an intellectual experiment is important only in proportion as it can be checked by measurement; for if this were so, there could be no exact geometrical proof. A line drawn on paper is not really a line but a more or less narrow strip, and a point a larger or smaller spot.

Max Planck
The ether, this child of sorrow of classical mechanics...

Max Planck
Nature prefers more probable to less probable states... Heat flows from a body of high temperature to a body of lower temperature, because the state of equal temperature is more probable than a state of unequal distribution of temperature.

Max Planck
Science does not mean an idle resting upon a body of certain knowledge; it means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an end which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp.

Max Planck
It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts.

Max Planck
Physics is an exact Science and hence depends upon measurement, while all measurement itself requires sense-perception. Consequently all the ideas employed in Physics are derived from the world of sense-perception.

Max Planck
Every hypothesis in physical science has to go through a period of difficult gestation and parturition before it can be brought out into the light of day and handed to others, ready-made in scientific form so that it will be, as it were, fool-proof in the hands of outsiders who wish to apply it.

Max Planck
Nature prefers the more probable states to the less probable because in nature processes take place in the direction of greater probability. Heat goes from a body at higher temperature to a body at lower temperature because the state of equal temperature distribution is more probable than a state of unequal temperature distribution.

Max Planck
The measure of the value of a new hypothesis in physics is not its obviousness but its utility.

Max Planck
In all cases, the quantum hypothesis has given rise to the idea, that in Nature, changes occur which are not continuous, but of an explosive nature.

Max Planck
The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea.

Max Planck
Hitherto the principle of causality was universally accepted as an indispensable postulate of scientific research, but now we are told by some physicists that it must be thrown overboard. The fact that such an extraordinary opinion should be expressed in responsible scientific quarters is widely taken to be significant of the all-round unreliability of human knowledge. This indeed is a very serious situation.

Max Planck