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

144 CHAPTER 31. BOHR
• I am really an amateur. And if they go really into high mathematics I
cant follow.
• Opposites are complementary.
• When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry.
• You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who
can actually perform thought experiments!
• If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting
giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.
• It is only when an observation or measurement is made that the “wave
function collapses” as one of the “possible” states of the electron becomes
the “actual” state and the probability of all other possibilities
becomes zero
• If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood
it yet.
• There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum mechanical
description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to
find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.
• 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.
• We are suspended in language.
• The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite
of a profound truth is usually another profound truth.
• It is maintained (in the Como lecture) that the fundamental postulate
of the indivisibility of the quantum of action is itself, from the classical
point of view, an irrational element which inevitably requires us to
forego a causal description and which, because of the coupling between
phenomena and their observation, forces us to adopt a new mode of
description designated as complementary in the sense that any given
application of classical concepts precludes the simultaneous use of other