Science Quote by Niels Bohr

Bohr’s name lends this mash-up of futurist swagger and epistemic humility an almost mischievous authority: the physicist who helped invent modern uncertainty watching everyone else sound absurdly certain. The first claim - that technology has leapt more in decades than in millennia - is deliberately blunt, a compression of industrialization, electrification, computation into a single rhetorical shock. It’s not a historian’s ledger; it’s a provocation meant to reset your sense of “normal” time. By framing change as exponential, it smuggles in a moral: if the curve keeps bending upward, our institutions, habits, and ethics will keep lagging behind.

Then Bohr undercuts the intoxication. “The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also true” is a quiet rebuke to the techno-prophet voice that just spoke. Trivial truths behave like switches: on/off, correct/incorrect. Great truths act like quantum objects - they demand complementary descriptions that can look mutually exclusive. Progress is real; so is the fact that progress can destabilize. Prediction is necessary; so is the fact that prediction is often a costume for wishful thinking.

The subtext is a defense of intellectual pluralism in an era that rewards hot takes. Bohr is telling you that big claims about the future are precisely where binaries fail: technology can accelerate and still hit constraints; it can liberate and still concentrate power. The “anthropological” angle isn’t about gadgets, it’s about humans misreading scale - confusing a steep curve with a destiny.