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The Limits of Our Image of the Universe
| Article
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10596 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1986 |
5,146 Words |
| Author
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Max Born
Max Born, German physicist and pioneer of nuclear physics,
died in 1970. For his work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Physics in 1954. This essay appeared in Physics and Politics,
published by Oliver and Boyd in 1962. Every effort was made
to contact Born's family for permission to reprint this
article. |
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 discovered, that I shall talk first.
Physics is, after all, only one science among many, and science only one activity of the human spirit among many. What are the thought barriers of physics as seen from this wider standpoint? These are questions which cannot be answered by the methods of physics. I shall not avoid them, but shall give my opinion about them.
The Principle of Impotence. Theory of Heat
Every law of nature, in a certain sense, creates a barrier; that which contradicts it is unattainable. This statement has proved itself, in a way, reversible: When experience meets a barrier which it cannot penetrate in spite of great effort, then this is the key to new positive knowledge, a new law of nature, as we call it.
A British mathematician, Sir Edmund Whittaker (formerly a colleague of mine at the University of Edinburgh), believes this heuristic principle to be so important that he has given it a name: the "principle of impotence." This principle applies when there are, in an existing theory, statements about concepts (such as simultaneity of events at different places) which cannot be verified empirically. There is no place for such concepts in the system of physics; they are eliminated or altered as the new demands
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