The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.
NIELS BOHRThe 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.
More Niels Bohr Quotes
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No paradox, no progress.
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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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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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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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Some things are so serious, they can only be joked about.
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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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Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems .
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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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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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Address to Albert Einstein: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.
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One must always do what one really cannot.
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If you aren’t confused by quantum mechanics, you haven’t really understood it.
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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.
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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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Oh what idiots we have all been, this is just as it must be.
NIELS BOHR