Niels Bohr Quotes

I had set out to disprove quantum field theory - and the opposite occurred! I was shocked.

If everything is made up of little particles and all the little particles follow quantum mechanics, then shouldn't everything just follow quantum mechanics?

Modern physics has... revealed that every sub-atomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction.

Newtonian physics runs into problems at the subatomic level. Down there--in the land of hadrons, quarks, and Schrödinger's cat--things gent freaky. The cool rationality of Isaac Newton gives way to the bizarre unpredictability of Lewis Carroll.

I got into physics through pop science and quantum science and ended up being such a quantum groupie.

Nevertheless, all of us who work in quantum physics believe in the reality of a quantum world, and the reality of quantum entities like protons and electrons.

If anybody says he can think about quantum physics without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them.

A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.

From a consideration of the immense volume of newly discovered facts in the field of physics, especially atomic physics, in recent years it might well appear to the layman that the main problems were already solved and that only more detailed work was necessary.

My main professional interest during the 1970s has been in the dramatic change of concepts and ideas that has occurred in physics during the first three decades of the century, and that is still being elaborated in our current theories of matter. The new concepts in physics have brought about a profound change in our world view; from the mechanistic conception of Descartes and Newton to a holistic and ecological view, a view which I have found to be similar to the views of mystics of all ages and traditions.

This is the awe-inspiring universe of magic: There are no atoms, only waves and motions all around. Here, you discard all belief in barriers to understanding. You put aside understanding itself. This universe cannot be seen, cannot be heard, cannot be detected in any way by fixed perceptions. It is the ultimate void where no preordained screens occur upon which forms may be projected. You have only one awareness here—the screen of the magi: Imagination! Here, you learn what it is to be human. You are a creator of order, of beautiful shapes and systems, an organizer of chaos.

I read a lot of science books - I love cosmology, quantum theory, particle physics. So my idea of a great read would probably put you directly into a coma.

The general notions about human understanding...which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of, or new. Even in our own culture, they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom.

We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.

The more we split and pulverise matter artificially, the more insistently it proclaims its fundamental unity.

Every atom in your body is the same quark in different places at the same moment in time.

Subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities, but can only be understood as interconnections between the preparation of an experiment and the subsequent measurement.

Quantum mechanics provides us with an approximate, plausible, conjectural explanation of what actually is, or was, or may be taking place inside a cyclotron during a dark night in February.

The world of science lives fairly comfortably with paradox. We know that light is a wave, and also that light is a particle. The discoveries made in the infinitely small world of particle physics indicate randomness and chance, and I do not find it any more difficult to live with the paradox of a universe of randomness and chance and a universe of pattern and purpose than I do with light as a wave and light as a particle. Living with contradiction is nothing new to the human being.

Modern physics had shown that the rhythm of creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in the birth and death of living creatures, but is also the very essence of inorganic matter. For modern physicists...Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter.

Can a physicist visualize an electron? The electron is materially inconceivable and yet, it is so perfectly known through its effects that we use it to illuminate our cities, guide our airlines through the night skies and take the most accurate measurements. What strange rationale makes some physicists accept the inconceivable electrons as real while refusing to accept the reality of a Designer on the ground that they cannot conceive Him?

Gradually, physicists began to realise that nature, at the atomic level, does not appear as a mechanical universe composed of fundamental building blocks, but rather as a network of relations, and that, ultimately, there are no parts at all in this interconnected web. Whatever we call a part is merely a pattern that has some stability and therefore captures our attention.

Photons come out of nowhere, they cannot be stored, they can barely be pinned down in time, and they have no home in space whatsoever. That is, light occupies no volume and has no mass. The similarity between a thought and a photon is very deep. Both are born in a region beyond space and time where nature controls all processes in that void which is full of creative intelligence.

A page from a journal of modern experimental physics will be as mysterious to the uninitiated as a Tibetan mandala. Both are records of enquiries into the nature of the universe.

We seem gradually to be groping toward an understanding of the world of subatomic particles, but we really do not know how far we have yet to go in this task.