author
Mathematics
Physics
Quantum_Physics
Niels Bohr
KEYS (10k)
3 Niels Bohr
1 Alfred Korzybski
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
120 Niels Bohr
3 Timothy Ferriss
3 Michio Kaku
3 Frank Wilczek
3 Anonymous
2 Walter Isaacson
2 Sam Kean
2 Fred Alan Wolf
2 Arthur C Clarke
1:A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself. ~ Niels Bohr, #KEYS
2:You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth. ~ Niels Bohr, #KEYS
3:Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question.[A caution he gives his students, to be wary of dogmatism.] ~ Niels Bohr, #KEYS
4:To The Works Of: Aristotle, Cassius J. Keyser, Eric T. Bell, G. W. Leibnitz, Eugen Bleuler, J. Locke, Niels Bohr, Jacques Loeb, George Boole, H. A. Lorentz, Max Born, Ernst Mach, Louis De Brogue, J. C. Maxwell, Georg Cantor, Adolf Meyer, Ernst Cassirer, Hermann Minkowsja, Charles M. Child, Isaac Newton, C. Darwin, Ivan Pavlov, Rene Descartes, Giuseppe Peano, P. A. M. Dirac, Max Planck, A. S. Eddington, Plato, Albert Einstein, H. Poincare, Euclid, M. Faraday, Sigmund Freud, Josiah Royce, Karl F. Gauss, G. Y. Rainich, G. B. Riemann, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Graham, Ernest Rutherford, Arthur Haas, E. Schrodinger, Wm. R. Hamilton, C. S. Sherrington, Henry Head, Socrates, Werner Heisenberg, Arnold Sommerfeld, C. Judson Herrick, Oswald Veblen, E. V. Huntington, Wm. Alanson White, Smith Ely Jeluffe, Alfred N. Whitehead, Ludwig Wittgenstein Which Have Creatly Influenced My Enquiry This System Is Dedicated ~ Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity , #KEYS
*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Vivere est Cogitare ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
2:No paradox, no progress. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
3:We are suspended in language. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
4:Nothing exists until it is measured. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
5:Truth and clarity are complementary. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
6:Einstein, stop telling God what to do! ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
7:I go into the Upanishads to ask questions. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
8:One must always do what one really cannot. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
9:Stop telling God what to do with his dice. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
10:Predition is risky, especially of the future. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
11:Prediction is difficult, especially the future. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
12:Predictions are hard, especially abot the future. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
13:You are not thinking, you are just being logical. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
14:It is difficult to predict, especially the future. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
15:Opposites are not contradictory but complementary. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
16:It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
17:A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
18:No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
19:The opposite of every great idea is another great idea. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
20:Accuracy and clarity of statement are mutually exclusive. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
21:Some things are so serious, they can only be joked about. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
22:Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
23:Oh what idiots we have all been, this is just as it must be ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
24:There are some things so serious you have to laugh at them. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
25:Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
26:If an idea does not appear bizarre, there is no hope for it. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
27:The Stone Age didn't end because the World ran out of stones ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
28:No, no, no, you are not thinking; you are just being logical. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
29:Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
30:Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
31:Perhaps I have found out a little about the structure of atoms. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
32:Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
33:When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
34:There are some things so serious that you have to laugh at them. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
35:Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
36:Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
37:Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
38:If we couldn't laugh at ourselves, that would be the end of everything. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
39:Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
40:It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
41:We all know your idea is crazy. The question is whether it is crazy enough. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
42:In the great drama of existence we are audience and actors at the same time. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
43:It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
44:If you aren't confused by quantum mechanics, you haven't really understood it. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
45:Address to Albert Einstein: You are not thinking. You are merely being logical. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
46:There is no hope for any speculation that does not look absurd at first glance. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
47:It is very difficult to make an accurate prediction, especially about the future. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
48:If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
49:Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
50:Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
51:Physics is the belief that a simple and consistent description of nature is possible. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
52:An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
53:Anyone who can contemplate quantum mechanics without getting dizzy hasn't understood it. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
54:How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
55:The measurement we get when we measure something is not a property of the thing measured. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
56:An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
57:An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
58:Əgər kvant fizikası sizi qorxutmayıbsa, düməli, siz ondan heçnə başa düşməmisiniz.
Niels Bohr ~ Jo Nesb,#NFDB
59:If you think you understand it, that only shows that you don't know the first thing about it. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
60:A deep truth is a truth so deep that not only is it true but it's exact opposite is also true. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
61:Anybody who is not shocked by this subject has failed to understand it. [of quantum mechanics] ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
62:The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
63:How wonderful that we have met with paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. —NIELS BOHR ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
64:I did not like the man [Niels Bohr] when you showed him to me, with his hair all overhis head. ~ Winston Churchill, #NFDB
65:Prediction,” as Niels Bohr liked to say, “is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future. ~ Steven D Levitt, #NFDB
66:We are trapped by language to such a degree that every attempt to formulate insight is a play on words. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
67:A person who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what had been said. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
68:Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
69:The physicist Niels Bohr was fond of saying, “Prediction is very hard to do. Especially about the future ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
70:You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who can actually perform thought experiments! ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
71:Un experto es una persona que ha cometido todos los errores que se pueden cometer en un determinado campo. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
72:It is a great pity that human beings cannot find all of their satisfaction in scientific contemplativeness. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
73:An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” –Niels Bohr ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
74:Sometimes the child in one behaves a certain way and the rest of oneself follows behind, slowly shaking its head. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
75:The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
76:The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
77:You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
78:It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we say about nature. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
79: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. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
80:Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
81:Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself it’s own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
82:If you can fathom quantum mechanics without getting dizzy, you don't get it
Et kvantebitte spring nærmere supercomputeren ~ Niels Bohr,#NFDB
83:And anyone who thinks they can talk about quantum theory without feeling dizzy hasn't yet understood the first thing about it. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
84: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, #NFDB
85:The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
86:We all agree your theory is crazy. What divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being right.”* { Niels Bohr } ~ John Kehoe, #NFDB
87:An independant reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
88:The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness. —NIELS BOHR ~ Jonathan Maberry, #NFDB
89:When searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
90:If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet,” the Danish Nobel physicist Niels Bohr once said. ~ Satya Nadella, #NFDB
91:The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
92:Truth is something that we can attempt to doubt, and then perhaps, after much exertion, discover that part of the doubt is not justified. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
93:If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
94:Niels Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of theorists into thinking that the job (interpreting quantum theory) was done 50 years ago. ~ Murray Gell Mann, #NFDB
95: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. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
96:Niels Bohr wrote, “The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth. ~ Anne Lamott, #NFDB
97:Nature is far more inventive than is human imagination, and the microscopic world is not what Niels Bohr or anyone else could have guessed. ~ Daniel J Siegel, #NFDB
98:Isolated material particles are abstractions, their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems . ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
99:There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
100:Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation but as a question.
[A caution he gives his students, to be wary of dogmatism.] ~ Niels Bohr,#NFDB
101:An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. —NIELS BOHR, Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
102:An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” –Niels Bohr Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner ~ Timothy Ferriss, #NFDB
103:Of course I don't believe in it [pointing to horseshoe on his office wall]. But I understand that it brings you luck whether you believe in it or not. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
104:And at that age, the only boys I didn’t think were gross were dead scientists – and it’s not like I wanted to kiss those guys. (No offense, Niels Bohr.) ~ Sarah Cross, #NFDB
105:Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
106:When we measure something we are forcing an undetermined, undefined world to assume an experimental value. We are not measuring the world, we are creating it. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
107:All rising curves that show unwelcome trends in human affairs will approach infinity if extended far enough, but it is we who dictate the curve and not vice versa. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
108:What is that we human beings ultimately depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
109: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 ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
110: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 ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
111:Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr’s combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality. ~ David Deutsch, #NFDB
112: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. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
113: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, #NFDB
114:With personal intervention on behalf of the principle of openness, which exposes crime as well as error to public view, Niels Bohr played a decisive part in the rescue of the Danish Jews. ~ Richard Rhodes, #NFDB
115:You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who can actually perform thought experiments! ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
116:Existen dos clases de verdades: las triviales, cuyo opuesto es, evidentemente, imposible, y las verdades profundas, que se caracterizan porque su opuesto también es una verdad profunda. Niels Bohr ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
117:In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, as far as possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
118: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 ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
119: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. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
120:Chapter four describes the new model of matter that was proposed. Niels Bohr applied the new wave-particle relationship to the inside of an atom and a new explanation for atomic light presented itself. This time ~ Fred Alan Wolf, #NFDB
121:The legendary Danish physicist Niels Bohr distinguished two kinds of truths. An ordinary truth is a statement whose opposite is a falsehood. A profound truth is a statement whose opposite is also a profound truth. ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
122:A visitor to Niels Bohr's country cottage, noticing a horseshoe hanging on the wall, teasing the eminent scientist about this ancient superstition. "Can it be true that you, of all people, believe it will bring you luck?' ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
123: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. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
124:Most humans, and even many dogs, picture atoms as tiny little solar systems, with negatively charged electrons orbiting a positively charged nucleus. This picture originated with Niels Bohr in 1913, when he proposed the first ~ Chad Orzel, #NFDB
125: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. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
126:Rutherford is a man you can rely on; he comes regularly and enquires how things are going and talks about the smallest details - Rutherford is such an outstanding man and really interested in the work of all the people around him. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
127: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, #NFDB
128:The 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. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
129:A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance. 'Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?' he asks. 'No,' replies the colleague, 'but I've been told that it works even if you don't believe in it.' ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
130:Technology has advanced more in the last thirty years than in the previous two thousand. The exponential increase in advancement will only continue. Anthropological Commentary The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also true. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
131:The old saying of the two kinds of truth. To the one kind belongs statements so simple and clear that the opposite assertion obviously could not be defended. The other kind, the so-called 'deep truths', are statements in which the opposite also contains deep truth. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
132:When asked ... [about] an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer, 'There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.' ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
133:Niels Bohr, one of the founding fathers of quantum physics and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1922, echoed Einstein when he said, “If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet. Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. ~ Ziad Masri, #NFDB
134:One thought spectra are marvellous, but it is not possible to make progress there. Just as if you have the wing of a butterfly then certainly it is very regular with the colors and so on, but nobody thought one could get the basis of biology from the coloring of the wing of a butterfly. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
135:[About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]
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,#NFDB
136:In quantum mechanics...an observation here and now changes in general the 'state' of the observed system....I consider the unpredictable change of the state by a single observation...to be an abandonment of the idea of the isolation of the observer from the course of physical events outside himself. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
137:The very nature of the quantum theory ... forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
138:It’s quite interesting to note that Townes’s colleagues at Columbia were skeptical of his idea. Niels Bohr, one of the great quantum physicists, and Nobel laureate Isadore Rabi, head of the university's physics department, told Townes his maser idea would never work and urged him to abandon the project. ~ James Scott Bell, #NFDB
139:In physics we deal with states of affairs much simpler than those of psychology and yet we again and again learn that our task is not to investigate the essence of things-we do not at all know what this would mean&mash;but to develop those concepts that allow us to speak with each other about the events of nature in a fruitful manner. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
140:Somebody once asked Niels Bohr why he had a horseshoe hanging above the front door of his house. Surely you, a world famous physicist, can't really believe that hanging a horseshoe above your door brings you luck? Of course not, Bohr replied, but I have been reliably informed that it will bring me luck whether I believe in it or not. ~ Arthur Koestler, #NFDB
141:Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
142:[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. ~ J Robert Oppenheimer, #NFDB
143:Truth is:
I was always that kind of girl.
Truth is:
they don’t make dresses any whiter than
mine.
Truth is:
I am not Demeter’s daughter.
I am Heisenberg’s ripe tomato
I am Niels Bohr’s piece on the side.
In the winter I am a particle.
In the summer I am a wave.
And I didn’t get to be queen of hell
by letting folks off easy. ~ Catherynne M Valente,#NFDB
144: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. In this respect our task must be to account for such experience in a manner independent of individual subjective judgement and therefore objective in the sense that it can be unambiguously communicated in ordinary human language. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
145:One of the leading figures in quantum physics, Niels Bohr, would sometimes tell his students, “The problem with your idea is not that it is crazy, but that it is not crazy enough.” Bohr’s point was that reality has shown itself stranger than science fiction; indeed it is sometimes more bizarre than anything we can imagine. This strange new world offers possibilities that weren’t thought of before. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
146:For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory regarding the limited applicability of such customary idealizations, we must in fact turn to quite other branches of science, such as psychology, or even to that kind of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
147:...Bir gün insanların hayatını kurtaran bir doktor olacak. Onlara mutluluk dağıtacak. Ya da mutluluktan daha iyi bir şey: Huzur.
Saygı görecek.
Bir gün.
Bu olaylar, paskalya tavşancığı diye bir şeyin olmadığı ortaya çıktıktan sonra gerçekleşiyor. Noel baba, diş perisi, Aziz Christopher, Newton fiziği ve atomun Niels Bohr modelinden çok sonra bile bizim salak çocuk Anneciğin söylediklerine hala inanıyor. ~ Chuck Palahniuk,#NFDB
148:I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a. subjective side won't get us very far. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
149:We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character... We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
150:The difference between science and philosophy is that the scientist learns more and more about less and less until she knows everything about nothing, whereas a philosopher learns less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. There is truth in this clever crack, but, as Niels Bohr impressed, while the opposite of a trivial truth is false, the opposite of a great truth is another great truth. ~ Dorion Sagan, #NFDB
151:The yin-yang sign is an appropriate symbol for complementarity, and was adopted as such by Niels Bohr. Its two aspects are equal, but different; each contains, and is contained within, the other. Perhaps not coincidentally, Niels Bohr was very happily married.
Once recognized, complimentarity is a wisdom we rediscover, and confirm, both in the physical world and beyond. It is a wisdom I embrace, and recommend to you. ~ Frank Wilczek,#NFDB
152:This is the most important joke I've ever heard. Niels Bohr, the founder of Quantum Physics, had a friend to dinner. As the friend left, he noticed a horseshoe nailed above Bohr's front door. He said to Bohr, accusingly, "Niels, you're a great scientist. You can't believe in superstitions." Bohr answered, "I don't, but apparently it works anyway."As with confirmation bias, we tend to lean toward superstitions that benefit us. ~ John Cleese, #NFDB
153:Richard Rhodes’s exceptionally readable The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the place to start. This sweeping chronicle of the difficult and sobering history of the endeavor called the Manhattan Project is marked by Rhodes’s insightful studies of the complicated people who were most involved in the creation of the bomb, from Niels Bohr to Robert Oppenheimer. Rhodes followed this book with Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. ~ Nancy Pearl, #NFDB
154:Niels Bohr believed that the complementarity that existed between the wave and the particle aspects of nature were indications of a much deeper complementarity in which irreconcilable pairs of opposites need not be contradictory. As he once said, "the opposite of a small truth may be a lie, but the opposite of a great truth is also a great truth." Thus the ring i may be a symbol of the reconciliation of complementary parts of the whole. ~ Fred Alan Wolf, #NFDB
155:Using the word much as it is used in atomic physics to characterize the relationship between experience obtained by different experimental arrangements and visualized only by mutually exclusive ideas, we may truly say that different human cultures are complimentary to each other ... each such culture represents a harmonious balance of traditional conventions by means of which latent potentialities of human life unfold themselves in a way which reveals to us new aspects of its unlimited richness and variety. ~ Niels Bohr, #NFDB
156:And even if Einstein could not be defied, he might be evaded. Those who sponsored this view talked hopefully about shortcuts through higher dimensions, lines that were straighter than straight, and hyperspacial connectivity. They were fond of using an expressive phrase coined by a Princeton mathematician of the last century: “Wormholes in space.” 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 ~ Arthur C Clarke, #NFDB
157:Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by biological patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic scientist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived. ~ Robert M Pirsig, #NFDB
158:Judaism, Christianity and Islam are not just three different religions or civilisations. Had this been so, the devotees of each might still consider themselves a chosen people. More generously, each might have come to Niels Bohr’s conclusion that the opposite of a trivial truth is a falsehood, but the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth. There is more than one way of being-in-the-world under the sovereignty of God. More probably they would simply have ignored one another. Their differences would not have led to centuries of bloodshed and animosity. ~ Jonathan Sacks, #NFDB
159:I have chosen to talk about one of the founder fathers of twentieth-century physics, Niels Bohr, because in both these respects he was a consummate artist. He had no ready-made answers. He used to begin his lecture courses by saying to his students, ‘Every sentence that I utter should be regarded by you not as an assertion but as a question’. What he questioned was the structure of the world. And the people that he worked with, when young and old (he was still penetrating in his seventies), were others who were taking the world to pieces, thinking it out, and putting it together. He ~ Jacob Bronowski, #NFDB
160:Our deepest description of physical reality, in quantum theory and in the four Core Theories of forces (gravitation, electromagnetism, strong and weak forces), bring in concepts that call to mind yin and yang. Niels Bohr, an influential founder of quantum theory, saw strong parallels between his concept of complementarity and the unified duality of yin-yang. He designed a coat of arms for himself, in which the yin-yang figures centrally (see figure 42, page 324). Our Core Theories center on the interplay between lightlike space filling fluids (yang) and substances (yin) they both direct and respond to. ~ Frank Wilczek, #NFDB
161:Early in April 1933, the German government passed a law declaring that Jews (defined as anyone with a Jewish grandparent) could not hold an official position, including at the Academy or at the universities. Among those forced to flee were fourteen Nobel laureates and twenty-six of the sixty professors of theoretical physics in the country. Fittingly, such refugees from fascism who left Germany or the other countries it came to dominate—Einstein, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Hans Bethe, Lise Meitner, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Otto Stern, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, and others—helped to assure that the Allies rather than the Nazis first developed the atom bomb. Planck ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
162:Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn’t a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do. ~ Sam Kean, #NFDB
163:the dark lady who inspired Shakespeare’s sonnets, the lady of Arosa may remain forever mysterious.” (Unfortunately, because Schrödinger had so many girlfriends and lovers in his life, as well as illegitimate children, it is impossible to determine precisely who served as the muse for this historic equation.) Over the next several months, in a remarkable series of papers, Schrödinger showed that the mysterious rules found by Niels Bohr for the hydrogen atom were simple consequences of his equation. For the first time, physicists had a detailed picture of the interior of the atom, by which one could, in principle, calculate the properties of more complex atoms, even molecules. Within months, the new quantum theory became a steamroller, obliterating many of the most puzzling questions about the atomic world, answering the greatest mysteries that had stumped scientists since the Greeks. The ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
164:On his journey home from delivering his acceptance speech in Sweden the following summer, Einstein stopped in Copenhagen to see Bohr, who met him at the train station to take him home by streetcar. On the ride, they got into a debate. “We took the streetcar and talked so animatedly that we went much too far,” Bohr recalled. “We got off and traveled back, but again rode too far.” Neither seemed to mind, for the conversation was so engrossing. “We rode to and fro,” according to Bohr, “and I can well imagine what the people thought about us.”43 More than just a friendship, their relationship became an intellectual entanglement that began with divergent views about quantum mechanics but then expanded into related issues of science, knowledge, and philosophy. “In all the history of human thought, there is no greater dialogue than that which took place over the years between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein about the meaning of the quantum,” says the physicist John Wheeler, who studied under Bohr. The social philosopher C. P. Snow went further. “No more profound intellectual debate has ever been conducted,” he proclaimed.44 Their dispute went to the fundamental heart of the design of the cosmos: Was there an objective reality that existed whether or not we could ever observe it? Were there laws that restored strict causality to phenomena that seemed inherently random? Was everything in the universe predetermined? ~ Walter Isaacson, #NFDB
165:Lo que sigue es una pregunta de un examen de física en la Universidad de Copenhague: «Describa cómo se puede determinar la altura de un rascacielos con un barómetro». Un alumno respondió: «Se ata un largo cabo de cuerda al cuello del barómetro y entonces se descuelga el barómetro desde el tejado del rascacielos hasta el suelo. La longitud de la cuerda más la longitud del barómetro será igual a la altura del edificio». Esta original respuesta irritó tanto al examinador que el estudiante fue suspendido. El estudiante recurrió basándose en que su respuesta era indiscutiblemente correcta y la universidad nombró un árbitro independiente para decidir el caso. El árbitro juzgó que la respuesta era realmente correcta pero no mostraba ningún conocimiento apreciable de la física. Para resolver el problema se decidió llamar al estudiante y concederle seis minutos para que pudiera dar una respuesta oral que mostrase al menos una mínima familiaridad con los principios básicos de la física. Durante cinco minutos, el estudiante se sentó en silencio, centrado en sus pensamientos. El árbitro le recordó que el tiempo estaba corriendo, a lo que el estudiante respondió que tenía varias respuestas pero que no sabía cuál utilizar. Al ser advertido de que debía apresurarse, el estudiante respondió como sigue: «En primer lugar, se puede llevar el barómetro hasta el tejado del rascacielos, dejarlo caer desde el borde y medir el tiempo que tarda en llegar al suelo. La altura del edificio puede calcularse entonces a partir de la fórmula H = 0.5gt2. Pero ¡adiós barómetro! »O si hay sol, se podría medir la altura del barómetro, ponerlo luego vertical y medir la longitud de la sombra. Luego se podría medir la longitud de la sombra del rascacielos y, a partir de ahí, es una simple cuestión de aritmética proporcional calcular la altura del rascacielos. »Pero si uno quiere ser muy científico, se podría atar un corto cabo de cuerda al barómetro y hacerlo oscilar como un péndulo, primero al nivel del suelo y luego en el tejado del rascacielos. La altura se calcula por la diferencia en la fuerza gravitatoria restauradora T = 2π(l/g)1/2. »O si el rascacielos tiene una escalera de emergencia exterior, sería más fácil subirla y marcar la altura del rascacielos en longitudes del barómetro, y luego sumarlas. »Por supuesto, si simplemente se quiere ser aburrido y ortodoxo, se podría utilizar el barómetro para medir la presión del aire en el tejado del rascacielos y en el suelo, y convertir la diferencia de milibares en metros para saber la altura del edificio. »Pero puesto que continuamente se nos exhorta a ejercer la independencia mental y aplicar métodos científicos, indudablemente la mejor manera sería llamar a la puerta del conserje y decirle “Si usted quiere un bonito barómetro nuevo, le daré este si me dice la altura de este rascacielos”». El estudiante era Niels Bohr ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1
The_Act_of_Creation_text, #The Act of Creation, #Arthur Koestler, #Psychology
is less obvious in modern theoretical physics, although it is implied in
one of its basic postulates: according to Niels Bohr's Principle of Com-
plementarity the dtimate constituents of the universeelectrons,
--
tend to preserve the direction of their axes; he tried to magnetize a
piece of iron by rotating it fast. In 191 3, when Niels Bohr invented his
model of the atom as a miniature solar system, it was thought that the