Science & Tech Quote by Max Born

Born is doing something quietly radical here: defending scientific revolution as continuity, not rupture. Coming from a founder of quantum mechanics, that’s not academic throat-clearing; it’s damage control after the early 20th century blew up the old story of a clockwork universe. Relativity and quantum theory weren’t just new equations. They were “turbulent happenings” in the cultural sense: public bewilderment, philosophical panic, and the easy opportunism of people declaring classical physics dead and, by extension, reason itself suspect.

His key move is the phrase “limiting cases.” It’s a mathematician’s peace treaty. Newton isn’t wrong; he’s approximate. Classical mechanics survives as the special regime where velocities are low and actions are large compared to Planck’s constant. That technical idea smuggles in a broader ethic: science progresses by conservation as much as by overthrow. New theories earn legitimacy by explaining why the old ones worked as well as they did, where they break, and how both can be true within different domains.

The subtext also reads like a rebuttal to political and intellectual chaos. Born lived through World War I, the Weimar era, Nazism, exile, and World War II. To say the “continuity of our science” remained intact is to insist on an island of cumulative rationality when institutions, borders, and moral narratives were collapsing. It’s not naive optimism; it’s a strategy for trust. If knowledge can be nested rather than discarded, then modernity isn’t a series of humiliations. It’s a widening map with older roads still visible, even when the landscape turns strange.