Niels Bohr — "Accuracy and clarity of expression are a matter of degree."
Accuracy and clarity of expression are a matter of degree.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Perfect precision and perfect clarity in language are not absolute qualities you either achieve or miss. They exist on a sliding scale. The more carefully you define your terms, the less accessible your writing becomes to general readers. The more you simplify for clarity, the more nuance you sacrifice. Every statement involves a tradeoff between being exact and being understood, and writers must consciously choose where on that spectrum their words should land.
Relevance to Niels Bohr
Bohr wrestled with this tension daily. Describing quantum behavior required language built for a classical world, and he famously revised papers dozens of times, agonizing over each word. His complementarity principle itself argued that mutually exclusive descriptions could both be true. Colleagues joked his speech was nearly inaudible and his prose opaque, yet he insisted imprecise poetry often captured reality better than rigid equations. This quote distills his lifelong struggle to communicate the uncommunicable.
The era
Early twentieth-century physics had shattered classical certainties. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, and quantum superposition defied ordinary language. Bohr's Copenhagen Institute became the epicenter of furious debates with Einstein, Schrodinger, and others over what quantum mechanics actually meant. Philosophers like Wittgenstein were simultaneously questioning whether language could describe reality at all. Scientists needed new vocabulary for phenomena that refused visualization, making Bohr's observation about the inherent limits of precise expression deeply urgent for his generation.
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