It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we say about Nature . – Neils Bohr. Neils Bohr was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory. Although his model of the atom - a nucleus surrounded by orbiting electrons in discrete energy levels - has been supplanted by other models, another of his principles, complementarity, remains valid. Complementarity is the idea that certain events can be analyzed into two different and opposite descriptions. For example, depending upon how the physicist is viewing light, it can be thought of either as a wave or as a stream of particles. This situation occurs because we have no word to describe a single event which exhibits apparently mutually exclusive characteristics, consequently, we have a difficult time imagining how such an event can be possible. As Bohr stated it, “If anybody says he can think about quantum physi...
My alarm clock goes off every morning at eight, except for the few times when I have a breakfast date. Usually I wake up about an hour before that, or at least I partly wake up. It is important that I remain in a “not quite awake but not quite asleep” state, because I consider that time as the germination period for whatever seeds happen to have blown into my head.