Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

Chapter 31
Bohr
31.1 Life and Work
• You can talk about people like Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Confucius, but the
thing that convinced me that such people existed were the conversations
with Bohr. (Wheeler)
• People were pretty well spellbound by what Bohr said While I was very
much impressed by [him], his arguments were mainly of a qualitative
nature, and I was not able to really pinpoint the facts behind them.
What I wanted was statements which could be expressed in terms of
equations, and Bohr’s work very seldom provided such statements. I
am really not sure how much later my work was influenced by these
lectures of Bohr’s... He certainly did not have a direct influence because
he did not stimulate one to think of new equations. (Dirac)
• I admired Bohr very much. We had long talks together, long talks in
which Bohr did practically all the talking. (Dirac)
• Bohr’s standpoint, that a space-time description is impossible, I reject
a limine. Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does
not consist only of physics, and life does not consist only of science. The
aim of atomic research is to fit our empirical knowledge concerning it
into our other thinking. All of this other thinking, so far as it concerns
the outer world, is active in space and time. If it cannot be fitted into
space and time, then it fails in its whole aim and one does not know
what purpose it really serves. (Schrödinger)
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