Daily Inspiration Quote by Max Born

Born’s jab lands because it refuses the easy binary: credulity versus enlightenment. He tags two “objectionable” camps that mirror each other more than they admit. On one side are people who “believe the incredible” - faith as a vending machine for comforting impossibilities. On the other are people who treat “the scientific method” not as a disciplined way of testing claims, but as a total replacement for belief itself, as if human cognition could be scrubbed of commitments, intuitions, and metaphysical bets.

The subtext is methodological humility from someone who helped build modern physics and knew, firsthand, how non-linear discovery really is. Scientific work runs on hunches, aesthetic preferences (elegant equations), trust in instruments, and shared norms about what counts as evidence. Those are beliefs - not in the sense of arbitrary dogma, but in the sense of starting assumptions that can’t be derived from the method they enable. Born is warning against a new priesthood: “science” invoked as an identity, a cultural cudgel, or a substitute theology, rather than a practice that remains provisional and self-correcting.

Context matters: Born lived through the early 20th century’s ideological absolutisms and the quantum revolution’s epistemic shock. Quantum mechanics shattered the fantasy of a fully transparent, clockwork universe; it also made the public hungry for certainty, whether mystical or technocratic. His line isn’t anti-science and it isn’t pro-credulity. It’s anti-fanaticism - including the fanatical belief that you’ve transcended belief.