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
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."
"The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning."
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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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