Quotes About Bohr

Weinberg happily realized that at Berkeley, "Bohr was God and Oppie was his prophet.

Chemistry, until my childhood, not that long ago, was regarded as a calculating device. Because you couldn't reduce to physics. So it's just some way of calculating the result of experiments. The Bohr atom was treated that way.

Arnold Sommerfeld generalized Bohr's model to include elliptical orbits in three dimensions. He treated the problem relativistically (using Einstein's formula for the increase of mass with velocity), ... According to historian Max Jammer, this success of Sommerfeld's fine-structure formula "served also as an indirect confirmation of Einstein's relativistic formula for the velocity dependence of inertia mass.

To resolve the discrepancy between waves of probability and our commonsense notion of existence, Bohr and Heisenberg assumed that after a measurement is made by an outside observer, the wave function magically "collapses," and the electron falls into a definite state—that is, after looking at the tree, we see that it is truly standing. In other words, the process of observation determines the final state of the electron. Observation is vital to existence.

When Einstein later complained that "God does not play dice with the world," Bohr reportedly fired back, "Stop telling God what to do.

When Einstein objected to quantum mechanics by remarking that "God does not play dice," Bohr responded by admonishing him, "Stop telling God what to do." Which means: Nature is richer than our metaphysical prejudices. It has more imagination than we do.

A lightbulb does not emit continuous light, it emits a hail of evanescent photons. At small scale, there is no continuity, or fixity, in the real world: there are discrete events, interactions, gapped and discrete. Schrödinger had fought tooth and nail against quantum discontinuity, against Bohr's quantum leaps, against Heisenberg's world of matrices: he wanted to defend the image of continuous reality provided by classical intuition.

Quando Einstein muore, Bohr, il suo grandissimo rivale, ha parole di commovente ammirazione. Quando pochi anni dopo muore Bohr, qualcuno prende una fotografia della lavagna nel suo studio: c'è un disegno. Rappresenta la «scatola piena di luce» dell'esperimento mentale di Einstein. Fino all'ultimo, la voglia di confrontarsi e capire di più. Fino all'ultimo, il dubbio.

Ama bütün çocuklar gibi kuram da kendi yoluna gitti, Einstein da onu art?k tan?yamaz oldu. 1910'lar ve 1920'ler boyunca büyümesine yön verense Danimarkal? Niels Bohr oldu. I??k enerjisi gibi atomlardaki elektronlar?n belirli bir enerjiyle yaln?zca bir atom yörüngesinden di?erine "s?çrayabilece?ini", bunu yaparken de bir foton sald???n? veya so?urdu?unu anlayan odur.

When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration. When a few years later Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of the blackboard in his study. There's a drawing on it. A drawing of the "light-filled box" in Einstein's thought experiment. To the very last, the desire to challenge oneself and understand more. And to the very last: doubt.

I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments ?

Einstein cherished the belief that quantum theory was merely a stopgap, which would eventually be replaced by a theory that was deterministic and causal. Over the years, he made many clever attempts to show that uncertainty relations could be circumvented, but they were foiled, one by one, with relish, by Bohr.

Bohr's influence on the physics and the physicists of our century was stronger than that of anyone else, even than that of Albert Einstein.

About the great synthesis of atomic physics in the 1920s ] It was a heroic time. It was not the doing of any one man; it involved the collaboration of scores of scientists from many different lands. But from the first to last the deeply creative, subtle and critical spirit of Niels Bohr guided, restrained, deepened and finally transmuted the enterprise.

Bohr: You never cared what got destroyed on the way, though. As long as the mathematics worked out you were satisfied. Heisenberg: If something works it works. Bohr: But the question is always, What does the mathematics mean, in plain language? What are the philosophical implications?" Excerpt From: Michael Frayn. "Copenhagen

Other reports chronicled a mysterious September 1941 meeting where Werner Heisenberg admitted to Niels Bohr, who was living in Nazi-occupied Denmark, that a bomb could be made, "and we're working on it.

We walked up and down in the snow, I on skis and she on foot ( she said and proved that she could get along just as fast that way), and gradually the idea took shape that this was no chipping or cracking of the nucleus but rather a process to be explained by Bohr 's idea that the nucleus was like a liquid drop; such a drop might elongate and divide itself. { On his aunt and fellow science Lise Meitner }

It seems clear that the present quantum mechanics is not in its final form. Some further changes will be needed, just about as drastic as the changes made in passing from Bohr's orbit theory to quantum mechanics. Some day a new quantum mechanics, a relativistic one, will be discovered, in which we will not have these infinities occurring at all. It might very well be that the new quantum mechanics will have determinism in the way that Einstein wanted.