If we couldn’t laugh at ourselves, that would be the end of everything.
NIELS BOHRThe present state of atomic theory is characterized by the fact that we not only believe the existence of atoms to be proved beyond a doubt, but also we even believe that we have an intimate knowledge of the constituents of the individual atoms.
More Niels Bohr Quotes
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No, no, you’re not thinking; you’re just being logical.
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There are two sorts of truth: trivialities, where opposites are clearly absurd, and profound truths, recognised by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth.
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Anyone who can contemplate quantum mechanics without getting dizzy hasn’t understood it.
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There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.
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An independant reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.
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We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words.
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Physics is the belief that a simple and consistent description of nature is possible.
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Address to Albert Einstein: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.
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Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.
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Our task is not to penetrate the essence of things, the meaning of which we do not know anyway, but rather to develop concepts which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature
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It is, indeed, perhaps the greatest prospect of humanistic studies to contribute through an increasing knowledge of the history of cultural development to that gradual removal of prejudices which is the common aim of all science.
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It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness.
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In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.
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Opposites are not contradictory but complementary.
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Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.
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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.
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It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.
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You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who can actually perform thought experiments!
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An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.
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If you aren’t confused by quantum mechanics, you haven’t really understood it.
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If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.
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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.
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Nothing exists until it is measured.
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If you have a correct statement, then the opposite of a correct statement is of course an incorrect statement, a wrong statement. But when you have a deep truth, then the opposite of a deep truth may again be a deep truth.
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Truth and clarity are complementary.
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Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.
NIELS BOHR