Science Quote by Niels Bohr

Expertise, Bohr suggests, is less a pedestal than a well-mapped minefield. The line works because it flips the usual PR story of mastery: the expert isn’t the person with the most pristine certainty, but the one who has cataloged the most plausible disasters. In a culture that treats credentials as a proxy for truth, Bohr’s definition smuggles in a harsher, more scientific reality: knowledge is often negative knowledge. You learn what holds by learning what breaks.

The “very narrow field” clause is doing quiet, corrective work. Bohr isn’t dismissing experts; he’s delimiting them. Modern life loves the expert as a roaming authority figure, ready to opine outside their lane. Bohr’s phrasing insists that real competence is bounded, local, and earned through close contact with failure. It’s also a subtle jab at intellectual vanity. If your status comes from knowing the “worst mistakes,” then your superiority is basically an index of how many ways you’ve been wrong, or at least how intimately you understand wrongness.

Context matters: Bohr was a central architect of quantum theory, a domain built on counterintuitive results and experimental traps. In physics, the graveyard is full of elegant ideas that turned out to be false. His intent reads as both professional wisdom and epistemic humility: progress happens when you stop mistaking confidence for comprehension, and start treating error as data.

Underneath the wit is a practical ethic: listen hardest to the people who can name the failure modes. They’ve already paid for the map.