Max von Laue Quotes

Electrical science has revealed to us the true nature of light, has provided us with innumerable appliances and instruments of precision, and has thereby vastly added to the exactness of our knowledge.

I imagined there would be a way to crack the diffraction barrier. But of course I didn't know exactly how it would work, but I had a gut feeling that there must be something, and so I tried to think about it, to be creative.

At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion.

It was strange, in a way, because there were no ideas involved in the laser that weren't already known by somebody 25 years before lasers were discovered. The ideas were all there; just, nobody put it together.

Electrical science has disclosed to us the more intimate relation existing between widely different forces and phenomena and has thus led us to a more complete comprehension of Nature and its many manifestations to our senses.

A beam of luminous hydrogen canal rays has, owing to its velocity, exactly the same direction as that of the electric field in which it may be made to move.

Strings of gravity vibrate at a different frequency than strings of light.

If, as is the custom, I speak mainly about my own researches, I must say that I was fortunate in finding that not everything had yet been gleaned in the field of general thermodynamic radiation theory.

There is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us .... One day man will release and control its almost infinite power.

Nobody ever told us all matter radiated. We just assumed it did.

In a sense, the searches for both magnetic monopoles and gravity waves are very similar. But, theoretically, gravity waves are more solid.

Now, since the time of Newton there had been a debate about whether light was a wave - that is, a traveling disturbance in some background medium - or a particle, which travels regardless of the presence of a background medium. The observation of Maxwell that electromagnetic waves must exist and that their speed was identical to that of light ended the debate: light was an electromagnetic wave.

There are a lot of mysteries about quantum mechanics, but they mostly arise in very detailed measurements in controlled settings.

There are relatively few experiments in atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.

I had set out to disprove quantum field theory - and the opposite occurred! I was shocked.

The process of radiation may be, and is, continuous - at any rate within limits extending to far smaller quantities than the quantum.

I get paid to do what I love. If you understand physics, the foundation of the atomic theory and relativity, you understand how the future is going to unfold. You understand what things are not possible. You understand why things work. I get paid to do what I love the most, and that is to work on the Unified Field Theory and to see the future.

What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced.

Working out another system to replace Newton's laws took a long time because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange. One had to lose one's common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.

If we have an atom that is in an excited state and so is going to emit a photon, we cannot say when it will emit the photon. It has a certain amplitude to emit the photon at any time, and we can predict only a probability for emission; we cannot predict the future exactly.

Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive.

Today's particle physics describe light as a crumple in space, and we may have deformed space in such a way that they noticed something peculiar - and they had the ability to investigate it.

I think it's science and physics are just starting to learn from all these experiments. These experiments have been carried out hundreds and hundreds of times in all sorts of ways that no physicist really questions the end point. I think that these experiments are very clearly telling us that consciousness is limitless and the ultimate reality.

My discovery that black holes emit radiation raised serious problems of consistency with the rest of physics. I have now resolved these problems, but the answer turned out to be not what I expected.

Some wonder whether some day we will arrive at a theory of everything and run out of new problems to solve - much as the effort to explore the earth ran out of new continents to explore.