Niels Bohr Quotes

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.

How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical.

There are some things so serious that you have to laugh at them.

Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think

A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself.

Stop telling God what to do with his dice.

The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.

I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair; and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighbouring park I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?

There are trivial truths and there are great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.

Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself it’s own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it.

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.

Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question. [A caution he gives his students, to be wary of dogmatism.]

You can recognize a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.

Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world

We must be clear that 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 and establishing mental connections. [About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]

The very nature of the quantum theory ... forces us to regard the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the union of which characterizes the classical theories, as complementary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing the idealization of observation and description, respectively.

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true.

We are suspended in language.

Mental patterns do not originate out of inorganic nature. They originate out of society, which originates out of inorganic nature. And, as anthropologists know so well, what a mind thinks is as dominated by biological patterns as social patterns are dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific connection between mind and matter. As the atomic scientist, Niels Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual description of nature is always culturally derived.

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.

It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negation is also a deep truth

Looking at the waves scudding outwards and getting lost on the horizon, he could not help but recall the words of his mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had once told him that a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.

It is not enough to be wrong, one must also be polite.

Prediction,” as Niels Bohr liked to say, “is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.

The opposite of a truth," Klaus quoted, "is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth...may be another profound truth." [Niels Bohr]

The Stone Age didn't end because the World ran out of stones

The ultimate lesson is that science isn’t special – at least not anymore. Maybe back when Einstein talked to Niels Bohr, and there were only a few dozen important workers in every field. But there are now three million researchers in America. It’s no longer a calling, it’s a career. Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. Its practitioners aren’t saints, they’re human beings, and they do what human beings do – lie, cheat, steal from one another, sue, hide data, fake data, overstate their own importance and denigrate opposing views unfairly. That’s human nature. It isn’t going to change

You must come to Copenhagen to work with us. We like people who can actually perform thought experiments!

[About the great synthesis of atomic physics in the 1920s] It was a heroic time. It was not the doing of any one man; it involved the collaboration of scores of scientists from many different lands. But from the first to last the deeply creative, subtle and critical spirit of Niels Bohr guided, restrained, deepened and finally transmuted the enterprise.

Vivere est Cogitare

In our description of nature the purpose is not to disclose the real essence of the phenomena but only to track down, as far as possible, relations between the manifold aspects of our experience.

The legendary Danish physicist Niels Bohr distinguished two kinds of truths. An ordinary truth is a statement whose opposite is a falsehood. A profound truth is a statement whose opposite is also a profound truth.

And at that age, the only boys I didn’t think were gross were dead scientists – and it’s not like I wanted to kiss those guys. (No offense, Niels Bohr.)

Nobody knows how the stand of our knowledge about the atom would be without him. Personally, Bohr is one of the amiable colleagues I have met. He utters his opinions like one perpetually groping and never like one who believes himself to be in possession of the truth.

The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.

The physicist Niels Bohr was fond of saying, “Prediction is very hard to do. Especially about the future

I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a. subjective side won't get us very far.

Truth is: I was always that kind of girl. Truth is: they don’t make dresses any whiter than mine. Truth is: I am not Demeter’s daughter. I am Heisenberg’s ripe tomato I am Niels Bohr’s piece on the side. In the winter I am a particle. In the summer I am a wave. And I didn’t get to be queen of hell by letting folks off easy.

The difference between science and philosophy is that the scientist learns more and more about less and less until she knows everything about nothing, whereas a philosopher learns less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. There is truth in this clever crack, but, as Niels Bohr impressed, while the opposite of a trivial truth is false, the opposite of a great truth is another great truth.

The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth (Niels Bohr)." By this, he means that we require a larger reading of the human past, of our relations with each other, the universe and God, a retelling of our older tales to encompass many truths and to let us grow with change.

كف عن إخبار الرب عما يجب عليه ان يفعله

If you can fathom quantum mechanics without getting dizzy, you don't get it Et kvantebitte spring nærmere supercomputeren

Perhaps I have found out a little about the structure of atoms.

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.

الخبير هو شخص ارتكب كل الأخطاء الممكنة في مجال محدد للغاية.

Despite the earnest belief of most of his fans, Einstein did not win his Nobel Prize for the theory of relativity, special or general. He won for explaining a strange effect in quantum mechanics, the photoelectric effect. His solution provided the first real evidence that quantum mechanics wasn’t a crude stopgap for justifying anomalous experiments, but actually corresponds to reality. And the fact that Einstein came up with it is ironic for two reasons. One, as he got older and crustier, Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.

The great physicist Niels Bohr said, “There are two types of truth. In the shallow type, the opposite of a true statement is false. In the deeper kind, the opposite of a true statement is equally true.

Chinese dialectical reasoning had an impact on the physicist Niels Bohr, who was highly knowledgeable about Eastern thought. He attributed his development of quantum theory in part to the metaphysics of the East. There had been a centuries-long debate in the West about whether light consists of particles or waves. Belief in one was assumed to contradict and render impossible belief in the other. Bohr’s solution was to say that light can be thought of in both ways. In quantum theory, light can be viewed either as a particle or as a wave. Just never both at the same time.

In quantum mechanics...an observation here and now changes in general the 'state' of the observed system....I consider the unpredictable change of the state by a single observation...to be an abandonment of the idea of the isolation of the observer from the course of physical events outside himself.

How wonderful that we have met with paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress. —NIELS BOHR

Niels Bohr wrote, ‘The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth.

Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr’s combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality.

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” –Niels Bohr

Uncertainty and Complementarity It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature. —NIELS BOHR       DETERMINISM—THE

Bohr's standpoint, that a space-time description is impossible, I reject a limine. Physics does not consist only of atomic research, science does not consist only of physics, and life does not consist only of science. The aim of atomic research is to fit our empirical knowledge concerning it into our other thinking. All of this other thinking, so far as it concerns the outer world, is active in space and time. If it cannot be fitted into space and time, then it fails in its whole aim and one does not know what purpose it really serves.

Un experto es una persona que ha cometido todos los errores que se pueden cometer en un determinado campo.

عكس مقولة صحيحة هو مقولة خاطئة ، ولكن عكس حقيقة مثبتة يمكن ان يكون حقيقة مؤكدة

Il fatto che la terra fosse rotonda, e non piatta come loro credevano, non impedì ai Fenici di circumnavigare l'Africa. Anche se il loro modello atomico era sbagliato, è pur sempre a Enrico Fermi e Niels Bohr che si deve il successo nella costruzione della bomba atomica. Quello che conta è che la base operativa funzioni.

And even if Einstein could not be defied, he might be evaded. Those who sponsored this view talked hopefully about shortcuts through higher dimensions, lines that were straighter than straight, and hyperspacial connectivity. They were fond of using an expressive phrase coined by a Princeton mathematician of the last century: “Wormholes in space.” Critics who suggested that these ideas were too fantastic to be taken seriously were reminded of Niels Bohr’s “Your theory is crazy—but not crazy enough to be true.” If

The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.

An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.

It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature.

I feel personally responsible for the universe's inevitable heat death.

When [Niels] Bohr is about everything is somehow different. Even the dullest gets a fit of brilliancy.

If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet,” the Danish Nobel physicist Niels Bohr once said.

He was frustrated essentially because he wanted to be Niels Bohr or Albert Einstein, and he knew he wasn’t.” Weil

Əgər kvant fizikası sizi qorxutmayıbsa, düməli, siz ondan heçnə başa düşməmisiniz. Niels Bohr

Critics who suggested that these ideas were too fantastic to be taken seriously were reminded of Niels Bohr’s ‘Your theory is crazy - but not crazy enough to be true.’ If

Nobel Prize–winning physicist Niels Bohr: “An expert is someone who has made all possible mistakes in one field and there are no more to make.

We all agree your theory is crazy. What divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being right.”* { Niels Bohr }

The opposite of a truth," Klaus quoted, "is a falsehood; but the opposite of a profound truth...may be another profound truth." It either is or is not August...if I assert it's August when it isn't--simply false; but if I say that life is pain, that is true, profoundly so; so, too, that life is joy; the more profound the statement, the more reversible the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed... [Niels Bohr]

the dark lady who inspired Shakespeare’s sonnets, the lady of Arosa may remain forever mysterious.” (Unfortunately, because Schrödinger had so many girlfriends and lovers in his life, as well as illegitimate children, it is impossible to determine precisely who served as the muse for this historic equation.) Over the next several months, in a remarkable series of papers, Schrödinger showed that the mysterious rules found by Niels Bohr for the hydrogen atom were simple consequences of his equation. For the first time, physicists had a detailed picture of the interior of the atom, by which one could, in principle, calculate the properties of more complex atoms, even molecules. Within months, the new quantum theory became a steamroller, obliterating many of the most puzzling questions about the atomic world, answering the greatest mysteries that had stumped scientists since the Greeks. The

It’s quite interesting to note that Townes’s colleagues at Columbia were skeptical of his idea. Niels Bohr, one of the great quantum physicists, and Nobel laureate Isadore Rabi, head of the university's physics department, told Townes his maser idea would never work and urged him to abandon the project.

Early in April 1933, the German government passed a law declaring that Jews (defined as anyone with a Jewish grandparent) could not hold an official position, including at the Academy or at the universities. Among those forced to flee were fourteen Nobel laureates and twenty-six of the sixty professors of theoretical physics in the country. Fittingly, such refugees from fascism who left Germany or the other countries it came to dominate—Einstein, Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Hans Bethe, Lise Meitner, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Otto Stern, Eugene Wigner, Leó Szilárd, and others—helped to assure that the Allies rather than the Nazis first developed the atom bomb. Planck

Using the word much as it is used in atomic physics to characterize the relationship between experience obtained by different experimental arrangements and visualized only by mutually exclusive ideas, we may truly say that different human cultures are complimentary to each other ... each such culture represents a harmonious balance of traditional conventions by means of which latent potentialities of human life unfold themselves in a way which reveals to us new aspects of its unlimited richness and variety.

Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.

Some subjects are so serious that one can only joke about them.

On one occasion, sitting at the same Fuller Lodge dinner table with Niels Bohr, he heard Bohr’s concerns for an “open world.” Prompted by his conclusion that a postwar U.S. nuclear monopoly could lead to another war, in October 1944 Hall decided to act: “. . . it seemed to me that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented. I was not the only scientist to take that view.

We walked up and down in the snow, I on skis and she on foot (she said and proved that she could get along just as fast that way), and gradually the idea took shape that this was no chipping or cracking of the nucleus but rather a process to be explained by Bohr's idea that the nucleus was like a liquid drop; such a drop might elongate and divide itself. {On his aunt and fellow science Lise Meitner}

...Bir gün insanların hayatını kurtaran bir doktor olacak. Onlara mutluluk dağıtacak. Ya da mutluluktan daha iyi bir şey: Huzur. Saygı görecek. Bir gün. Bu olaylar, paskalya tavşancığı diye bir şeyin olmadığı ortaya çıktıktan sonra gerçekleşiyor. Noel baba, diş perisi, Aziz Christopher, Newton fiziği ve atomun Niels Bohr modelinden çok sonra bile bizim salak çocuk Anneciğin söylediklerine hala inanıyor.

There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature.

Richard Rhodes’s exceptionally readable The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the place to start. This sweeping chronicle of the difficult and sobering history of the endeavor called the Manhattan Project is marked by Rhodes’s insightful studies of the complicated people who were most involved in the creation of the bomb, from Niels Bohr to Robert Oppenheimer. Rhodes followed this book with Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.

Niels Bohr believed that the complementarity that existed between the wave and the particle aspects of nature were indications of a much deeper complementarity in which irreconcilable pairs of opposites need not be contradictory. As he once said, "the opposite of a small truth may be a lie, but the opposite of a great truth is also a great truth." Thus the ring i may be a symbol of the reconciliation of complementary parts of the whole.

[On famous Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr] [Niels] Bohr's sort of humor, use of parables and stories, tolerance, dependence on family, feelings of indebtedness, obligation, and guilt, and his sense of responsibility for science, community, and, ultimately, humankind in general, are common traits of the Jewish intellectual. So too is a well-fortified atheism. Bohr ended with no religious belief and a dislike of all religions that claimed to base their teachings on revelations.

Niels Bohr, the great Dane of quantum physics, was fond of saying, "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature. The double- crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it's the study of historians' studies. Historians have their axes to grind, just as physicists do. Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

A fellow scientist visited Bohr at his home and saw to his amazement that Bohr had fixed a horseshoe over the door for luck. ‘Surely, Niels, you don’t believe in that?’ ‘Of course not,’ Bohr replied. ‘But you see – the thing is that it works whether you believe in it or not.

A new phase of the quantum revolution was launched in 1913, when Niels Bohr came up with a revised model for the structure of the atom. Six years younger than Einstein, brilliant yet rather shy and inarticulate, Bohr was Danish and thus able to draw from the work on quantum theory being done by Germans such as Planck and Einstein and also from the work on the structure of the atom being done by the Englishmen J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. “At the time, quantum theory was a German invention which had scarcely penetrated to England at all,” recalled Arthur Eddington.

It was Oppenheimer’s good fortune to arrive shortly before an extraordinary revolution in theoretical physics drew to its close: Max Planck’s discovery of quanta (photons); Einstein’s magnificent achievement—the special theory of relativity; Niels Bohr’s description of the hydrogen atom; Werner Heisenberg’s formulation of matrix mechanics; and Erwin Schrödinger’s theory of wave mechanics. This truly innovative period began to wind down with Born’s 1926 paper on probability and causality. It was completed in 1927 with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Bohr’s formulation of the theory of complementarity.

It was about this same time that Oppenheimer met the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr, whose lectures he had attended at Harvard. Here was a role model finely attuned to Robert’s sensibilities. Nineteen years older than Oppenheimer, Bohr was born—like Oppenheimer—into an upper-class family surrounded by books, music and learning. Bohr’s father was a professor of physiology, and his mother came from a Jewish banking family. Bohr obtained his doctorate in physics at the University of Copenhagen in 1911. Two years later, he achieved the key theoretical breakthrough in early quantum mechanics by postulating “quantum jumps” in the orbital momentum of an electron around the nucleus of an atom. In 1922, he won the Nobel Prize for this theoretical model of atomic structure.

One of the people working with Rutherford was a mild and affable young Dane named Niels Bohr. In 1913, while puzzling over the structure of the atom, Bohr had an idea so exciting that he postponed his honeymoon to write what became a landmark paper. Because physicists couldn’t see anything so small as an atom, they had to try to work out its structure from how it behaved when they did things to it, as Rutherford had done by firing alpha particles at foil. Sometimes, not surprisingly, the results of these experiments were puzzling. One puzzle that had been around for a long time had to do with spectrum readings of the wavelengths of hydrogen. These produced patterns showing that hydrogen atoms emitted energy at certain wavelengths but not others. It was rather as if someone under surveillance kept turning up at particular locations but was never observed traveling between them. No one could understand why this should be.

Present at the first, in October 1927, were the three grand masters who had helped launch the new era of physics but were now skeptical of the weird realm of quantum mechanics it had spawned: Hendrik Lorentz, 74, just a few months from death, the winner of the Nobel for his work on electromagnetic radiation; Max Planck, 69, winner of the Nobel for his theory of the quantum; and Albert Einstein, 48, winner of the Nobel for discovering the law of the photoelectric effect. Of the remaining twenty-six attendees, more than half had won or would win Nobel Prizes as well. The boy wonders of the new quantum mechanics were all there, hoping to convert or conquer Einstein: Werner Heisenberg, 25; Paul Dirac, 25; Wolfgang Pauli, 27; Louis de Broglie, 35; and from America, Arthur Compton, 35. Also there was Erwin Schrödinger, 40, caught between the young Turks and the older skeptics. And, of course, there was the old Turk, Niels Bohr, 42, who had helped spawn quantum mechanics with his model of the atom and become the staunch defender of its counterintuitive ramifications.

After the discovery of spectral analysis no one trained in physics could doubt the problem of the atom would be solved when physicists had learned to understand the language of spectra. So manifold was the enormous amount of material that has been accumulated in sixty years of spectroscopic research that it seemed at first beyond the possibility of disentanglement. An almost greater enlightenment has resulted from the seven years of Röntgen spectroscopy, inasmuch as it has attacked the problem of the atom at its very root, and illuminates the interior. What we are nowadays hearing of the language of spectra is a true 'music of the spheres' in order and harmony that becomes ever more perfect in spite of the manifold variety. The theory of spectral lines will bear the name of Bohr for all time. But yet another name will be permanently associated with it, that of Planck. All integral laws of spectral lines and of atomic theory spring originally from the quantum theory. It is the mysterious organon on which Nature plays her music of the spectra, and according to the rhythm of which she regulates the structure of the atoms and nuclei.

When Oppenheimer took the floor and began speaking in his soft voice, everyone listened in absolute silence. Wilson recalled that Oppenheimer “dominated” the discussion. His main argument essentially drew on Niels Bohr’s vision of “openness.” The war, he argued, should not end without the world knowing about this primordial new weapon. The worst outcome would be if the gadget remained a military secret. If that happened, then the next war would almost certainly be fought with atomic weapons. They had to forge ahead, he explained, to the point where the gadget could be tested. He pointed out that the new United Nations was scheduled to hold its inaugural meeting in April 1945—and that it was important that the delegates begin their deliberations on the postwar world with the knowledge that mankind had invented these weapons of mass destruction. “I thought that was a very good argument,” said Wilson. For some time now, Bohr and Oppenheimer himself had talked about how the gadget was going to change the world. The scientists knew that the gadget was going to force a redefinition of the whole notion of national sovereignty. They had faith in Franklin Roosevelt and believed that he was setting up the United Nations precisely to address this conundrum. As Wilson put it, “There would be areas in which there would be no sovereignty, the sovereignty would exist in the United Nations. It was to be the end of war as we knew it, and this was a promise that was made. That is why I could continue on that project.” Oppenheimer had prevailed, to no one’s surprise, by articulating the argument that the war could not end without the world knowing the terrible secret of Los Alamos. It was a defining moment for everyone. The logic— Bohr’s logic—was particularly compelling to Oppenheimer’s fellow scientists. But so too was the charismatic man who stood before them. As Wilson recalled that moment, “My feeling about Oppenheimer was, at that time, that this was a man who is angelic, true and honest and he could do no wrong. . . . I believed in him.

Lo que sigue es una pregunta de un examen de física en la Universidad de Copenhague: «Describa cómo se puede determinar la altura de un rascacielos con un barómetro». Un alumno respondió: «Se ata un largo cabo de cuerda al cuello del barómetro y entonces se descuelga el barómetro desde el tejado del rascacielos hasta el suelo. La longitud de la cuerda más la longitud del barómetro será igual a la altura del edificio». Esta original respuesta irritó tanto al examinador que el estudiante fue suspendido. El estudiante recurrió basándose en que su respuesta era indiscutiblemente correcta y la universidad nombró un árbitro independiente para decidir el caso. El árbitro juzgó que la respuesta era realmente correcta pero no mostraba ningún conocimiento apreciable de la física. Para resolver el problema se decidió llamar al estudiante y concederle seis minutos para que pudiera dar una respuesta oral que mostrase al menos una mínima familiaridad con los principios básicos de la física. Durante cinco minutos, el estudiante se sentó en silencio, centrado en sus pensamientos. El árbitro le recordó que el tiempo estaba corriendo, a lo que el estudiante respondió que tenía varias respuestas pero que no sabía cuál utilizar. Al ser advertido de que debía apresurarse, el estudiante respondió como sigue: «En primer lugar, se puede llevar el barómetro hasta el tejado del rascacielos, dejarlo caer desde el borde y medir el tiempo que tarda en llegar al suelo. La altura del edificio puede calcularse entonces a partir de la fórmula H = 0.5gt2. Pero ¡adiós barómetro! »O si hay sol, se podría medir la altura del barómetro, ponerlo luego vertical y medir la longitud de la sombra. Luego se podría medir la longitud de la sombra del rascacielos y, a partir de ahí, es una simple cuestión de aritmética proporcional calcular la altura del rascacielos. »Pero si uno quiere ser muy científico, se podría atar un corto cabo de cuerda al barómetro y hacerlo oscilar como un péndulo, primero al nivel del suelo y luego en el tejado del rascacielos. La altura se calcula por la diferencia en la fuerza gravitatoria restauradora T = 2π(l/g)1/2. »O si el rascacielos tiene una escalera de emergencia exterior, sería más fácil subirla y marcar la altura del rascacielos en longitudes del barómetro, y luego sumarlas. »Por supuesto, si simplemente se quiere ser aburrido y ortodoxo, se podría utilizar el barómetro para medir la presión del aire en el tejado del rascacielos y en el suelo, y convertir la diferencia de milibares en metros para saber la altura del edificio. »Pero puesto que continuamente se nos exhorta a ejercer la independencia mental y aplicar métodos científicos, indudablemente la mejor manera sería llamar a la puerta del conserje y decirle “Si usted quiere un bonito barómetro nuevo, le daré este si me dice la altura de este rascacielos”». El estudiante era Niels Bohr