Niels Bohr Quotes

It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.

For nearly a hundred years, we have known that the material world is an illusion. Everything that seems solid - a rock, a tree, your body - is actually 99.999% empty space.

I think we can safely assume that no one understands quantum mechanics.

Niels Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of theorists into thinking that the job (interpreting quantum theory) was done 50 years ago.

A person who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what had been said.

I think I can safely say that nobody understands Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum mechanics is weird. I don't understand it. Just live with it. You don't have to understand the nature of things in order to build cool devices.

The realm of quanta is how I have intrinsically approached and viewed reality since I was born.

Bell's theorem...proves that quantum theory requires connections that appear to resemble telepathic communication.

Anyone not shocked by quantum mechanics has not yet understood it.

Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.

The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding. Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.

So far from science being irreligious, as many think, it is the neglect of science that is irreligious-it is the refusal to study the surrounding creation that is irreligious.

I find enough mystery in mathematics to satisfy my spiritual needs. I think, for example, that pi is mysterious enough (don't get me started!) without having to worry about God. Or if pi isn't enough, how about fractals? or quantum mechanics?

The great revelation of the quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature, in a context in which anything other than continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then.

The mathematical framework of quantum theory has passed countless successful tests and is now universally accepted as a consistent and accurate description of all atomic phenomena. The verbal interpretation, on the other hand - i.e., the metaphysics of quantum theory - is on far less solid ground. In fact, in more than forty years physicists have not been able to provide a clear metaphysical model.

Physics is the science of all the tremendously powerful invisibilities - of magnetism, electricity, gravity, light, sound, cosmic rays. Physics is the science of the mysteries of the universe. How could anyone think it dull?

On quantum theory I use up more brain grease (rough translation of German idiom) than on relativity.

You have nothing to do but mention the quantum theory, and people will take your voice for the voice of science, and belive anything.

Thus, the photons which constitute a ray of light behave like intelligent human beings: out of all possible curves they always select the one which will take them most quickly to their goal.

The discontinuous 'reduction of the wave packets' which cannot be derived from Schroedinger's equation is ... a consequence of the transition from the possible to the actual.

Everyone's heard of Erwin Schrodinger's famous thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a bottle of poison, which many people would suggest is about as far as you need to go.

Natural science sharpens the discrimination. There is no false logic in nature. All its properties are permanent: the acids and metals never lie; their yea is yea, their nay, nay. They are newly discovered but not new.

It was a dogma throughout most of the 20th century that quantum science only applied to subatomic matter, and we now know that not to be true. One of the major discoveries was Quantum Holography.

Anyone who can contemplate quantum mechanics without getting dizzy hasn't understood it.