Science Quote by Niels Bohr

A line like this is Bohr smuggling his whole worldview into a piece of etiquette. It reads almost apologetic, but it’s really a power move: a demand that you treat language as provisional, not decorative. Coming from a physicist who helped midwife quantum mechanics, the intent is practical. In Bohr’s universe, certainty isn’t just hard; it’s often a category error. If you speak as though your statements are final, you’re pretending the map is the territory.

The subtext is a warning about how easily words harden into dogma. Quantum physics didn’t merely add new facts; it broke the older grammar of explanation. Concepts like “particle” and “wave” function less like descriptions than like tools that work in some contexts and fail in others. Bohr’s famous complementarity is basically an argument that our best accounts are mutually partial, stitched together from incompatible but necessary viewpoints. So he asks to be read in the interrogative: not “I am right,” but “What does this claim even mean under the conditions we’re talking about?”

There’s also a social strategy here. Bohr ran a uniquely influential institute and gathered rivals and proteges around him. Framing every utterance as a question keeps conversation open, disarms ego, and invites collaboration without surrendering rigor. It’s intellectual humility that doubles as quality control: if you can’t restate a sentence as a question, you probably don’t understand its limits. In an era intoxicated with grand systems, Bohr’s stance is almost radical: precision begins by doubting your own declarative mood.