Science Quote by Max von Laue

Von Laue is doing something deceptively radical here: stripping away the romance of “spots on a screen” and insisting on a hierarchy of causes. In early X-ray crystallography, the dazzling interference pattern could tempt you to treat every visible feature as equally meaningful. He draws a line. Thermal motion and mixed wavelengths matter, but they matter in a very particular way: they modulate intensity, not geometry. The interference points stay put; what changes is how loudly they announce themselves.

That distinction is the quote’s real intent. Location encodes the crystal’s underlying periodicity, the hard architectural information. Brightness is temperament: the lattice’s jitter (atoms vibrating from heat) and the messiness of real radiation (a spread of wavelengths) smear or dampen the signal. Von Laue’s phrasing reads like a careful defense against misinterpretation: don’t mistake a dim spot for a missing structure, or a bright one for extra order. The pattern’s map is robust; the contrast is contingent.

The subtext is methodological authority. He’s building a scientific etiquette for a new instrument of seeing: which features deserve to be trusted as structural truth, and which are environmental noise riding on top of it. Historically, this lands in the aftermath of his 1912 breakthrough showing X-rays diffract through crystals, when the field had to convert uncanny images into reliable measurements. The sentence is dry by design; it’s a warning label in prose, anchoring a young technique to physical first principles.