Quotes About Bohr

The opposite of a plain truth, Neils Bohr liked to repeat, is a plain falsehood. But the opposite of a deep truth is another deep truth.

Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr's combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality.

They discussed the long, thorough theoretical paper by Niels Bohr and John Wheeler, "The mechanism of nuclear fission," that had been published in the September Physical Review and especially its conclusion, which Bohr and Wheeler had elaborated from Bohr's Sunday-morning graph work, that U235 was probably the isotope of uranium responsible for slow-neutron fission.1205

as the bomb for Bohr and Oppenheimer was a weapon of death that might also end war and redeem mankind—is one way the poem expresses the paradox.

Bohr was different in another regard as well; he was easily the most talented of all Rutherford's many students—and Rutherford trained no fewer than eleven Nobel Prize winners during his life, an unsurpassed record.

Bohr had searched the forbidding territory of the atom when he was young and discovered multiple structures of paradox; now he searched it again by the dark light of the energy it released and discovered profound political change.

When I told him about the [recent discovery of spectral lines where Bohr's theory had predicted they should appear] the big eyes of Einstein looked still bigger and he told me "Then it is one of the greatest discoveries.

Bohr proposed once that the goal of science is not universal truth. Rather, he argued, the modest but relentless goal of science is "the gradual removal of prejudices.

Bohr, for his part, supple pragmatist and democrat that he was, never an absolutist, heard once too often about Einstein's personal insight into the gambling habits of the Deity. He scolded his distinguished colleague finally in Einstein's own terms. God does not throw dice? "Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the world."502

This is why physicists, following Bohr's Principle of Complementarity, no longer believe in either the wave model or the particle model but say both models are equally useful. (Which is more useful at a time depends on the context.)

Pauli turned to the audience and argued, "Yes, my theory is crazy enough!" Then Bohr insisted, "No, your theory is not crazy enough!

1943 Bohr was tipped off by the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen that he faced immediate arrest as part of the plan to deport all of Denmark's Jews.

Nobody knows how the stand of our knowledge about the atom would be without him. Personally, Bohr is one of the amiable colleagues I have met. He utters his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one who believes himself to be in possession of the truth.

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." —Niels Bohr, Nobel Laureate & Quantum Physics Pioneer

Bohr was inconsistent, unclear, wilfully obscure and right. Einstein was consistent, clear, down-to-earth and wrong.

Bohr argued that life was not infused into an organism by some mysterious 'vital' force but, like everything else in the universe, must be grounded in atoms and molecules that behaved according to the laws of physics and chemistry.

Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, our picture of the world has radically changed.

Critics who suggested that these ideas were too fantastic to be taken seriously were reminded of Niels Bohr's 'Your theory is crazy - but not crazy enough to be true.' If

Today, all physicists know from studying Einstein and Bohr that sometimes an idea which looks completely paradoxical at first, if analyzed to completion in all detail and in experimental situations, may, in fact, not be paradoxical.

In a sense the debate between Penrose and Hawking is a continuation of that earlier argument, with Penrose playing the role of Einstein and Hawking that of Bohr.

The opposite of a truth," Klaus quoted, "is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth...may be another profound truth." It either is or is not August...if I assert it's August when it isn't--simply false; but if I say that life is pain, that is true, profoundly so; so, too, that life is joy; the more profound the statement, the more reversible the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed... [Niels Bohr]

I admired Bohr very much. We had long talks together, long talks in which Bohr did practically all the talking.

Bohr: Heisenberg, I have to say - if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities... Heisenberg: Then we should need a strange new quantum ethics.

On one occasion, sitting at the same Fuller Lodge dinner table with Niels Bohr, he heard Bohr's concerns for an "open world." Prompted by his conclusion that a postwar U.S. nuclear monopoly could lead to another war, in October 1944 Hall decided to act: ". . . it seemed to me that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented. I was not the only scientist to take that view.