Preface from
by Max Born
In 1921 I believed--and shared this belief with most of my contemporary physicists--that science produced an objective knowledge of the world, which is governed by deterministic laws. The scientific method seemed to me superior to other more subjective ways of forming a picture of the world-philosophy, poetry, and religion; and I even thought the unambiguous language of science to be a step towards a better understanding between human beings.
In 1951 I believed in none of these things. The border between object and subject had been blurred, deterministic laws had been replaced by statistical ones, and although physicists understood one another well enough across all national frontiers, they had contributed nothing to a better understanding of nations, but had helped in inventing and applying the most horrible weapons of destruction.
I now regard my former belief in the superiority of science over other forms of human thought and behaviour as self-scientific thinking as compared with the vagueness of metaphysical systems.
Still, I believe that the rapid change of fundamental concepts and failure to improve the moral standards of human society are no demonstration of the uselessness of science in the search for truth and for a better life.
The change of ideas was not arbitrary, but was forced on the physicists by their observations. The final criterion of truth is the agreement of a theory with experience, and it is only when all attempts to describe the facts in the frame of accepted ideas fail that new notions are formed, at first cautiously and reluctantly, and then, if they are experimentally confirmed, with increasing confidence. In this way the classical philosophy of science was transformed into the modern one, which culminates in NIELS BOHR'S Principle of Complementarity.