Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962)
Jewish Danish physicist.
How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
Oh, what idiots we all have been. This is just as it must be.
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.
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.
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.
Of course not ... but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it.
Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.
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.
Truth and clarity are complementary.
Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.
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.
Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.
Your theory is crazy, the question is whether it's crazy enough to be true.
We in the back are convinced your theory is crazy. But what divides us is whether it is crazy enough.
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.
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.
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough.
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.
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
The first thing Bohr said to me was that it would only then be profitable to work with him if I understood that he was a dilettante. The only way I knew to react to this unexpected statement was with a polite smile of disbelief. But evidently Bohr was serious. He explained how he had to approach every new question from a starting point of total ignorance. It is perhaps better to say that Bohr's strength lay in his formidable intuition and insight rather than erudition.