Niels Bohr — "The goal of science is to make sense of the world, not to explain it away."
The goal of science is to make sense of the world, not to explain it away.
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More from Niels Bohr
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth."
"If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet."
"We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others."
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Details
Attributed, distinguishing between understanding and reductionism.
Date: Mid 20th century
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Science exists to deepen our understanding of reality, not to reduce everything to cold mechanisms that strip away meaning. True scientific knowledge should illuminate the world and make it more comprehensible to human minds, not dissolve wonder into mere equations or dismiss phenomena as unimportant simply because they can be mathematically described.
Relevance to Niels Bohr
Bohr spent his career developing quantum mechanics, a field that paradoxically made atomic reality stranger, not simpler. His Copenhagen interpretation insisted the observer participates in measurement, preserving meaning within science. He famously debated Einstein over whether quantum physics eliminated deeper reality, consistently arguing science must accommodate mystery rather than explain it away.
The era
In the early 20th century, classical physics was collapsing as quantum mechanics revealed an irreducibly probabilistic universe. Reductionist materialism was dominant, threatening to render human experience scientifically meaningless. Bohr's era saw fierce debates about whether science explained everything mechanistically or revealed fundamentally new kinds of knowledge requiring philosophical humility about the limits of rational description.
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