"When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images"
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Bohr is smuggling an artistic manifesto into a scientist's mouth, and it lands because it names an embarrassment physics can never fully shake: at the smallest scales, our most authoritative language stops being literal. "Atoms" aren’t tiny billiard balls; they’re mathematical objects that refuse to sit still inside ordinary nouns and verbs. So Bohr reaches for poetry not to romanticize science, but to discipline it. Poetry is what you use when precision means acknowledging the limits of description.
The subtext is Copenhagen-era realism, sharpened into rhetoric. Quantum mechanics was delivering results that worked spectacularly while scrambling common sense. "Creating images" is Bohr's way of defending models, metaphors, and complementarity (wave and particle) against the charge of being vague. The point is not that facts don't matter; it's that facts arrive already filtered through instruments, concepts, and the questions we ask. If you insist on a single, picturable "what is really happening", you end up doing bad metaphysics and worse physics.
It also works as a quiet rebuke to scientific machismo. Bohr frames humility as rigor: the honest scientist admits that talk about atoms is inevitably figurative. The poet's job is to build images that hold contradictions without collapsing; Bohr is arguing that quantum theory demands the same kind of mental architecture. In an age that treats STEM and the humanities as rival tribes, he's insisting they share a craft: making the invisible thinkable without pretending it's fully sayable.
The subtext is Copenhagen-era realism, sharpened into rhetoric. Quantum mechanics was delivering results that worked spectacularly while scrambling common sense. "Creating images" is Bohr's way of defending models, metaphors, and complementarity (wave and particle) against the charge of being vague. The point is not that facts don't matter; it's that facts arrive already filtered through instruments, concepts, and the questions we ask. If you insist on a single, picturable "what is really happening", you end up doing bad metaphysics and worse physics.
It also works as a quiet rebuke to scientific machismo. Bohr frames humility as rigor: the honest scientist admits that talk about atoms is inevitably figurative. The poet's job is to build images that hold contradictions without collapsing; Bohr is arguing that quantum theory demands the same kind of mental architecture. In an age that treats STEM and the humanities as rival tribes, he's insisting they share a craft: making the invisible thinkable without pretending it's fully sayable.
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| Topic | Science |
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