Science Quote by Max von Laue

Uncertainty, here, isnt a philosophical mood; its a technical trap Laue is warning you about with the crisp impatience of a working physicist. He is pointing at a classic problem in wave and diffraction measurements: if all you know is where the peak sits (the maximum), you can locate the condition for constructive interference, but you cannot pin down the absolute wavelength. You only know it up to an integer multiple because the math happily accommodates many cycles that land you on the same-looking maximum. The instrument gives you a highlight, not a map.

The phrasing "no further point of reference" is doing heavy lifting. Laue is insisting that measurement is never just reading off a graph; it is triangulation. A single maximum is a seductive datum because it looks definitive, yet it is structurally ambiguous without additional anchors: higher-order maxima, known lattice spacing, calibration lines, or independent constraints. "Uncertain by an integral factor" is the scientists way of saying: the ambiguity is not a small error bar you can shrink with better patience. Its discrete, baked into the setup, and only new information breaks it.

Context matters: Laue, central to the early era of X-ray crystallography, is writing from a world where turning diffraction spots into atomic structure depended on disentangling exactly these integer-order confusions. Subtext: the romance of direct observation is overrated. Nature hands you patterns; understanding requires reference frames, not just peaks.