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.
MAX PLANCKThere is a real world independent of our senses; the laws of nature were not invented by man, but forced on him by the natural world. They are the expression of a natural world order.
More Max Planck Quotes
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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.
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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.
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We are in a position similar to that of a mountaineer who is wandering over uncharted spaces, and never knows whether behind the peak which he sees in front of him and which he tries to scale there may not be another peak still beyond and higher up.
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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. For me, it is belief in a complete lawfulness in everything that happens.
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The assumption of an absolute determinism is the essential foundation of every scientific enquiry.
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A scientist is happy, not in resting on his attainments but in the steady acquisition of fresh knowledge.
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There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other.
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All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force.
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The quantum hypothesis will eventually find its exact expression in certain equations which will be a more exact formulation of the law of causality.
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Science advances funeral by funeral.
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The man who cannot occasionally imagine events and conditions of existence that are contrary to the causal principle as he knows it will never enrich his science by the addition of a new idea.
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Insight must precede application.
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There is no matter as such—mind is the matrix of all matter.
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Science progresses not by convincing the adherents of old theories that they are wrong, but by allowing enough time to pass so that a new generation can arise unencumbered by the old errors.
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The goal is nothing other than the coherence and completeness of the system not only in respect of all details, but also in respect of all physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, and all cultures.
MAX PLANCK






