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.
MAX PLANCKWe 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.
More Max Planck Quotes
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Science advances one funeral at a time.
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An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.
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There 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.
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I had always looked upon the search for the absolute as the noblest and most worth while task of science.
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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.
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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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Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.
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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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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.
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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.’
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It was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls.
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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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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.
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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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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?
MAX PLANCK






