Max Born Quotes

The present situation in physics is as if we know chess, but we don't know one or two rules.

I've always really been into science, and in the last five years I've gotten into theoretical physics and the origins of the universe.

The best that most of us can hope to achieve in physics is simply to misunderstand at a deeper level.

The chief difficulty of modern theoretical physics resides not in the fact that it expresses itself almost exclusively in mathematical symbols, but in the psychological difficulty of supposing that complete nonsense can be seriously promulgated and transmitted by persons who have sufficient intelligence of some kind to perform operations in differential and integral calculus.

To become a theoretical physicist ... you need to have a passionate love affair with the universe.

There is now a feeling that the pieces of physics are falling into place, not because of any single revolutionary idea or because of the efforts of any one physicist, but because of a flowering of many seeds of theory, most of them planted long ago.

There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end ofthe search for the ultimate laws of nature.

My present work concerns the problems connected with the theory of elementary particles, the theory of gravitation and cosmology and I shall be glad if I can manage to make some contribution to these important branches of science.

I do feel strongly that string theory is our best hope for making progress at unifying gravity and quantum mechanics.

Very much, string theory is simply a work in progress. What we are inching toward every day are predictions that within the realm of current technology we hope to test. It's not like we're working on a theory that is permanently beyond experiment. That would be philosophy.

As for the forces, electromagnetism and gravity we experience in everyday life. But the weak and strong forces are beyond our ordinary experience. So in physics, lots of the basic building blocks take 20th- or perhaps 21st-century equipment to explore.

I came to realise that string theory offers us the best hope of finding a unified theory of all matter and forces.

It's because somebody knows something about it that we can't talk about physics. It's the things that nobody knows anything about we can discuss.

By having simplified what is known, physicists have been led into realms which as yet are anything but simple. That at some time, they, too, will appear as simple consequences of a theory of which no one has yet dreamed is not a statement of fact.It is a statement of faith.

Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.

Physics as we know it will be over in six months - Max Born

Physics is the science of all the tremendously powerful invisibilities - of magnetism, electricity, gravity, light, sound, cosmic rays. Physics is the science of the mysteries of the universe. How could anyone think it dull?

We are not at the end but at the beginning of a new physics. But whatever we find, there will always be new horizons continually awaiting us.

Physics depends on a universe infinitely centred on an equals sign.

The best theory comes from string theory, which states that dark matter is nothing but a higher vibration of the string. We are, in some sense, the lowest octave of a vibrating string.

If you want to penetrate into the heart of physics, then let yourself be initiated into the mysteries of poetry.

I think the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles would revolutionize our understanding of the universe.

We know there must be new physics. For example, we cannot explain what dark matter is.

String theory has had a long and wonderful history. It originated as a technique to try to understand the strong force. It was a calculational mechanism, a way of approaching a mathematical problem that was too difficult, and it was a promising way, but it was only a technique. It was a mathematical technique rather than a theory in itself.

We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature. The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.