Bohr-ing Quotes

Niels Bohr was born at Copenhagen on this day in 1885. His genius was challenged by his physiologist father, and he entered a competition from the Academy of Sciences to solve a scientific problem - his paper was published in 1908 and won the gold medal. He received his Masters in Physics from Copenhagen University in 1911, his Doctorate in 1913, and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. He taught both in England and in Denmark until WW II. He found work and homes for many Jewish physicists who escaped to Denmark, then went to the US where he worked on the Manhattan Project. He was one of the physicists who campaigned for peace after seeing what the atomic bomb was capable of. His comments on life are filled with non sequiturs and charmingly border on the oxymoronic.

No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.

Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.
     All from Niels Bohr, 1885 - 1962