Max Born
Made fundamental contributions to quantum mechanics, particularly the Born rule for calculating probabilities.
Most quoted
"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."
— from Experiment and Theory in Physics, 1943
"The human race has today the means for annihilating itself—either in a fit of complete lunacy, i.e., in a big war, by a brief fit of destruction, or by a careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure."
— from Letter, 1957
"The human race has today the means for annihilating itself—either in a fit of complete lunacy, i.e., in a big war, by a brief fit of destruction, or by careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure."
— from Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 1957
All quotes by Max Born (371)
The classical concept of a trajectory of a particle has to be given up.
We are forced to conclude that the motion of the electron is not determined in the classical sense, but that there is a probability distribution for its position and momentum.
The idea of a definite orbit for an electron is a fiction.
The wave function does not describe the actual position of the particle, but the probability of finding it at a certain position.
God does not play dice, but he does not play deterministic chess either.
The deterministic world view of classical physics is an illusion.
The concept of causality, in its classical form, has to be abandoned.
Our knowledge of the world is inherently probabilistic.
The future is not uniquely determined by the present.
The classical picture of reality is fundamentally flawed.
The very act of observation influences the observed system.
There is no objective reality independent of our observation.
The world is not made of things, but of probabilities.
The idea of a 'real' electron, with a definite position and momentum, is a metaphysical assumption.
Quantum mechanics forces us to rethink our most fundamental concepts of reality.
The wave function is not a description of a physical wave, but a mathematical tool for calculating probabilities.
The 'collapse' of the wave function is not a physical process, but a change in our knowledge.
The concept of 'particle' and 'wave' are complementary, not contradictory.
Classical physics is an approximation of a more fundamental, probabilistic reality.
The universe is not a clockwork mechanism.
Contemporaries of Max Born
Other Physicss born within 50 years of Max Born (1882–1970).