An independant reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that reality cannot be fully understood through observation alone, as both the phenomena and observers influence it.
Niels Bohr's quote emphasizes the complex relationship between reality, phenomena, and the observers who study them. It highlights the idea that our understanding of reality is not purely objective, as both the phenomena we observe and the observational tools and methods we employ shape our interpretation of the world. This challenges traditional notions of an independent reality and invites deeper contemplation about how knowledge is constructed.
In practice
During a lecture on quantum mechanics, one might quote Bohr to illustrate the intricacies of measurement and reality.
When asked ... [about] an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer, '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.'
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.
Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.
When searching for harmony in life one must never forget that in the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.
And anyone who thinks they can talk about quantum theory without feeling dizzy hasn't yet understood the first thing about it.
Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.
An armchair Jungian would say the whole thing is about my own ongoing spiritual search. My interior life has always been one of trying to find a spiritual link, maybe because I'm from a family of separate religious philosophies: Protestant and Catholic.
Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
Whether our forebears were strangers who crossed the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Rio Grande, we are here only because this country welcomed them in and taught them that to be an American is about something more than what we look like, or what our last names are, or how we worship.
If I had never joined a church till I had found one that was perfect, I should never have joined one at all.
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