I often say that there is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.
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"If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet."
"The electron is an elementary particle, but it is not a 'thing' in the usual sense of the word."
"Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real."
"The word 'reality' is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly."
"The history of science is full of examples of how new ideas have been met with resistance, only to be accepted later."
A comprehensive statement of his philosophy on quantum mechanics.
Date: Mid 20th century
GeneralFound in 1 providers: grok
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Quantum physics doesn't reveal a hidden reality waiting to be discovered — it gives us a precise language for describing what we observe and measure. Bohr argues physics was never meant to answer 'what is nature really like?' but only 'what can we observe and communicate about nature?' The quantum world isn't a place; it's a framework of descriptions, and confusing the map for the territory leads physics into unanswerable metaphysical traps.
Bohr co-created the Copenhagen Interpretation, holding that quantum systems have no definite state until observed — the direct philosophical expression of this quote. He spent decades debating Einstein, who insisted physics must describe objective reality independent of observers. Bohr's complementarity principle — that light behaves as wave or particle depending on how you measure it — embodied this stance. As director of Copenhagen's Institute for Theoretical Physics, he made epistemological humility the dominant framework of 20th-century quantum physics.
The 1920s–1930s shattered classical physics' assumption that nature has definite, observer-independent properties. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, and the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox forced physicists to confront what their equations actually meant. Einstein insisted on hidden variables and objective reality; Bohr's camp said that question was unanswerable. After Hiroshima demonstrated physics' destructive power, separating physical description from claims about ultimate reality became not just intellectually but ethically urgent — science as language, not gospel.
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