Albert Einstein on the Limits of Scientific Description



“It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense. It would be a description without meaning—as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.”

— Albert Einstein

Quoted in Max Born, Physik im Wandel meiner Zeit, (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1966)



SOURCE: The New Quotable Einstein, collected and edited by Alice Calaprice, with a foreword by Freeman Dyson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 247. Rev. ed. of The Expanded Quotable Einstein, 2000. 1st ed: The Quotable Einstein, 1996. Forthcoming edition: The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, 2010.


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