Niels Bohr

1885–1962 · Danish physicist

Topics: physics, learning, creativity

• Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.

  — Niels Bohr

• 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

• 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.

  — Niels Bohr

• I consider those developments in physics during the last decades which have shown how problematical such concepts as "objective" and "subjective" are, a great liberation of thought.

  — Niels Bohr

• An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

  — Niels Bohr

• The objective world of nineteenth-century science was, as we know today, an ideal, limiting case, but not the whole reality.

  — Niels Bohr

• Physics is to be regarded not so much as the study of something a priori given, but rather as the development of methods of ordering and surveying human experience.

  — Niels Bohr

• The 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.

  — Niels Bohr

• Naturally, it still makes no difference whether the observer is a man, an animal, or a piece of apparatus, but it is no longer possible to make predictions without reference to the observer or the means of observation.

  — Niels Bohr