Niels Bohr
61 quotes
Biography
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future."
"How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress."
"Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it."
"Stop telling God what to do with his dice."
"The very nature of the quantum theory ... forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively."
"You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth."
"We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections."
"The grand discoveries which scientific experiment yielded at and about the turn of the century, in which investigators in many countries took an eminent part and which were destined all unexpectedly to give us a fresh insight into the structure of atoms, were due in the first instance, as all are aware, to the work of the great investigators of the English school, Sir Joseph Thomson and Sir Ernest Rutherford, who have inscribed their names on the tablets of the history of scientific research as distinguished witnesses to the truth that imagination and acumen are capable of penetrating the crowded mass of registered experience and of revealing Nature's simplicity to our gaze."
"Even the mathematical framework helps nothing, I would first like to understand how Nature avoids the contradictions. (1927)"
"The great extension of our experience in recent years has brought light to the insufficiency of our simple mechanical conceptions and, as a consequence, has shaken the foundation on which the customary interpretation of observation was based."
"Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems."
"What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character ... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly."
"For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory regarding the limited applicability of such customary idealizations, we must in fact turn to quite other branches of science, such as psychology, or even to that kind of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence."
"Contraria Sunt Complementa"
"However far the phenomena transcend the scope of classical physical explanation, the account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms. The argument is that simply by the word "experiment" we refer to a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learned and that, therefore, the account of the experimental arrangement and of the results of the observations must be expressed in unambiguous language with suitable application of the terminology of classical physics."
"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."
"Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language."
"Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are."
"Two sorts of truth: profound truths recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth, in contrast to trivialities where opposites are obviously absurd."
"Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question."
"It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness."
"Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them."
"Truth and clarity are complementary."
"It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite."
"Oh, what idiots we all have been. This is just as it must be."