Max Born (1882-1970) was a German physicist and mathematician. He made immense contribution quantum mechanics, relativity, chemical physics and optics. Several celebrated figures including Heisenberg, Edward Teller, Robert Oppenheimer, Max Delbrück, and Wolfgang Pauli, among others emerged under his guidance. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in November 1954 for his “fundamental research in Quantum Mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function.” Born and Heisenberg introduced matrix algebra into quantum mechanics.

Einstein described Born as “one who believes in the God who plays dice.” As he believed in an indeterminate world, Born thought that truth also must be multifaceted. He did not take the scientific knowledge to be absolutely true. He wrote: “I believe that ideas such as absolute certitude, absolute exactness, final truth, etc. are figments of the imagination which should not be admissible in any field of science. On the other hand, any assertion of probability is either right or wrong from the standpoint of the theory on which it is based. This loosening of thinking seems to me to be the greatest blessing which modern science has given to us. For the belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world.”

He condemned both the religious extreme as well as the scientific absolutism and maintained the domain of metaphysics. “There are metaphysical problems, which cannot be disposed of by declaring them meaningless. For, as I have repeatedly said, they are ‘beyond physics’ indeed and demand an act of faith. We have to accept this fact to be honest. There are two objectionable types of believers: those who believe the incredible and those who believe that ‘belief’ must be discarded and replaced by ‘the scientific method.’”

As a quantum physicist, he held that “The statistical deviations themselves obey certain laws. The miraculous events of religious tradition, however, are of a different kind, they lie on a different plane altogether; they are meant to prove something lying entirely beyond scientific consideration, such as the power of prayer, the intervention of divine power for or against certain men or nations…” “If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.”

He lamented the lack of integration of knowledge among scientists: “It is true that many scientists are not philosophically minded and have hitherto shown much skill and ingenuity but little wisdom.” In the context of the US-Russia conflict, he stated, “What can we scientists do in this conflict? We can join the spiritual, religious, philosophical forces, which reject war on ethical grounds. We can even attack the ideological foundations of the conflict itself. For science is not only the basis of technology but also the material for a sound philosophy.”