14 Niels Bohr Quotes on Science

Niels Bohr quotes on science

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.

5. For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory regarding the limited applicability of such customary idealisations, 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.

6. 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.

7. 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 therefor objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language.

8. There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract 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...

10. How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

13. Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.

14. Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

20. Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

21. Stop telling God what to do with his dice.

22. Of course not ... but I am told it works even if you don't believe in it.

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