Science Quote by Niels Bohr

Expertise, Bohr suggests, isn’t a crown you earn; it’s scar tissue you accumulate. The line has the dry, laboratory-minded humor of someone who spent a career watching elegant theories get mugged by reality. Calling an expert “a man” of his era is incidental; the real sting is in “made all the mistakes” and “narrow field,” a double pinprick at credentialism. The authority we grant to experts often feels like a moral status. Bohr reframes it as an inventory of failures, painstakingly compiled, methodically corrected.

The intent is not anti-intellectual. It’s anti-mystique. In physics, you don’t become reliable by being brilliant in the abstract; you become reliable by repeatedly being wrong in ways that teach you what can’t work. Bohr, a central architect of quantum theory, lived through a period when the old rules stopped behaving. Early 20th-century physics was a graveyard of confident assumptions: classical intuition, deterministic comfort, the belief that observation could stay politely separate from phenomena. The “mistakes” weren’t embarrassing detours; they were the engine of progress.

“Narrow field” is the crucial qualifier. Bohr is warning that competence is local. The same person who can anticipate every failure mode in spectroscopy may be a novice in politics, parenting, or pandemics. The subtext lands squarely on modern life: expertise is real, hard-won, and worth respecting, but it’s not omniscience. Trust the expert for their map of known pitfalls, not for prophecy.