Science Quote by Niels Bohr

Bohr is smuggling a physics lesson into a theory of thinking: reality is not built to flatter our preference for clean, one-way answers. A "trivial truth" is the kind that behaves politely under negation. Flip it and it collapses into obvious nonsense. But a "great truth" has an opposite that survives because it points at the same terrain from a different angle. That is not relativism; it is a warning about the limits of single-frame logic when you are dealing with complex systems.

The subtext is Copenhagen-era humility dressed as aphorism. Early 20th-century physics had just detonated the common-sense picture of the world: light behaving as wave and particle, measurement changing what is measured, causality becoming statistical. Bohr spent his career insisting that these weren't just technical glitches but clues about how knowledge works. Complementarity is the quiet engine behind this line: two descriptions can be mutually exclusive in practice yet jointly necessary to tell the truth.

The intent is also rhetorical. Bohr gives scientists and non-scientists permission to hold tension without calling it hypocrisy. "Great truths" feel paradoxical because our language evolved for apples and arrows, not electrons and probability amplitudes. Read culturally, it's an antidote to debate culture's addiction to dunks: when the subject is power, identity, markets, climate, medicine, the most honest statements often come paired with their own apparent contradiction. The opposite can be true because the world is multi-layered, and our categories are the crude part.