“Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination” — one of the famous quotes by Max Planck
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was a German theoretical physicist who laid the foundations for the quantum theory by introducing his famous theory of “quanta”, which won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918.
After the revolutionizing theory of quanta, Max Planck continued to contribute at a high level to various branches of physics and chemistry.
Also, Planck was the first prominent physicist to identify the potential Einstein’s special theory of relativity and got it into limelight.
Towards the end of his life, Planck devoted more and more of his writings to philosophical, aesthetic, and religious questions.
With such an experience and immense contribution in diverse fields, Planck is considered one of the most prominent physicists of all time. Let us look at 20 most famous Max Planck quotes which will give you a learning of lifetime and are considered one of the best physics quotes.
20 Quotes By Max Planck
1. “An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer“.
2. “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.”
3. “Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination“
4. “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.“
5. “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.“
6. “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.’”
7. “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out.”
8. “Ego is the immediate dictate of human consciousness.”
9. “We cannot rest and sit down lest we rust and decay. Health is maintained only through work. And as it is with all life so it is with science. We are always struggling from the relative to the absolute.”
10. “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
11. “Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical purpose whatsoever in view”
12. “A 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.”
13. “The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.”
14. “It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him.”
15. “Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.”
16. “The highest court is in the end one’s own conscience and conviction—that goes for you and for Einstein and every other physicist—and before any science there is first of all belief.”
17. “Science advances one funeral at a time.“
18. “This is one of man’s oldest riddles. How can the independence of human volition be harmonized with the fact that we are integral parts of a universe which is subject to the rigid order of nature’s laws?”
19. “Science…means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an aim which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but the intellect can never fully grasp.”
20. “All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force… We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.”
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