The more I find out (from pretty much a standing start) about the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, the more I like him. Quite apart from the quantum stuff - which, as he pointed out, you can't have understood if you think you understand it (or something like that) - there's the story of his escape flight from Denmark in 1943 on board an RAF Mosquito, when he absent-mindedly omitted to don an oxygen mask, and would have died if the pilot hadn't lowered his altitude. Bohr 'slept like a baby' throughout, and arrived in Britain refreshed.
He was, it seems, influenced by another great Dane, Kierkegaard - and , more intriguingly, he habitually read The Pickwick Papers to perfect his English. It would surely have been a joy to hear him speaking English, especially if he'd picked up some of Sam Weller's way of talking ('Battledore and shuttlecock's a wery good game, ven you ain't the shuttlecock and two lawyers the battledores, in which case it gets too excitin' to be pleasant'). Bohr must be the most quotable physicist, and one of the wisest: 'A triviality is a statement whose opposite is false. However, a great truth is a statement whose opposite may well be another great truth.' He also said 'There are some thing so serious you have to laugh at them' - and with that, surely, Sam Weller would have agreed.
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
What I think you mean he said was something like - if you're not shocked by quantum theory, you haven't understood it. And, yes, you're right, a great man. And Scandinavian like Bergman.
ReplyDeleteI'm hoping Madeley has something to say on this one...
ReplyDeleteYes, he is one of only a handful of physicists worth quoting. Of course, considering how few people are worth quoting, that so many of them are physicists is quite an achievement.
ReplyDeleteBohr was also the arch-instrumentalist, and bears a large portion of the responsibility for the 'shut-up and calculate' philosophy so prolific amongst modern physicists.
ReplyDelete