We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the idea that sometimes, unconventional theories can lead to groundbreaking discoveries, though they need to be sufficiently bold to be credible.
Niels Bohr’s quote suggests that the nature of scientific theories often requires a degree of boldness or unconventional thinking to be considered valid. While it is common for groundbreaking ideas to be initially dismissed as crazy, there is a nuanced difference in the level of 'craziness' that may actually lead to correct theories. Bohr implies that some theories may not push boundaries enough to be impactful, indicating that real progress in science often comes from thinking outside the box.
In practice
This quote can be used in a science class to encourage students to think creatively.
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 independant reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomenon nor to the agencies of observation.
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.
Growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine.
I was interested in the nature of human mental processes, which is what got me interested in psychoanalysis. And it became clear to me after a while that mental processes come from the brain, and in order to understand them, you need to be a biologist of the brain.
Imagination alone is not enough, because the reality of nature is far more wondrous than anything we can imagine
I did not come to NASA to make history.
I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty—and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.
Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the result that there have been no valuable additions of domestic animals in recent times, despite the efforts of modern science.
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