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The Limits of Our Image of the Universe |
| Section: MODERN THOUGHT / THE CHALLENGE OF MODERNITY |
| Author: Max Born |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1986 |
| Size: 5,146 Words, 29,850 Characters |
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When I was thinking about the subject of this lecture, I remembered, from my school days, some of Schiller's verse:
Thoughts can as close companions live together,
But things will hit each other hard in space.
These lines might serve me as a text today.
Thought believes itself limitless; nothing impedes it as long as it remains pure thought. However, when we consider things in the real world, this does not hold good any longer. Things do jostle each other in space.
Physics, with its sister sciences of astronomy, chemistry, crystallography, geology, etc., tries to construct a mental image of the world of things, and meets barriers everywhere. The conceivable and the actual do not always coincide.
It is about these barriers, which physics itself d...
. . .
... useful and indispensable to physics. If I wanted to give determinism a literary name, I would call it "fiction." I am aware of the fact that some great scientists, such as Planck and Einstein, whom I admire, clung to the idea of determinism, and that even today, some distinguished scientists do so. I, too, took pleasure in this fiction until I realised that it is not a picture of reality.
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