Niels Bohr Quotes

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.

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.

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.

الخبير هو شخص ارتكب كل الأخطاء الممكنة في مجال محدد للغاية.

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.

[About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

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.

It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness.

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

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.

كف عن إخبار الرب عما يجب عليه ان يفعله

It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

We are suspended in language.

The enrichment which art can give us originates in its power to remind us of harmonies beyond the grasp of systematic analysis. Literary, pictorial and musical art may be said to form a renunciation of definition, characteristic of scientific communication, leaves fantasy a freer display. In particular, in poetry this purpose is achieved by the juxtaposition of words relating to shifting observational situation, thereby emotionally uniting manifold aspects of human knowledge.

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.