You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.
Niels Bohr
Born: October 7, 1885 Died: November 18, 1962
Niels Henrik David Bohr (7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.
Biographical information from: Wikiquote
Alternative Names for Niels Bohr
Birth name - Original name given at birth:
- Niels Henrik David Bohr (English (en))
You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who can actually perform thought experiments!
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How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.
There are some things so serious that you have to laugh at them.
Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.
A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.
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:]
It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.
The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.
Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question.
[A caution he gives his students, to be wary of dogmatism.]
It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.
We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.