16/10/2025
Hmmm... thought for the day:
“You can recognise a small truth because its opposite is a falsehood. The opposite of a great truth is another truth.”
― Niels Bohr, Danish theoretical physicist (1885–1962)
Bohr came up with this statement when talking about the nature of electrons. Physicists had discovered that the electron both is a particle and is not a particle at the same time. To solve this problem Bohr and others suggested treating the nature of the electron as a “great truth”.
What does that mean? Let us first take an example of a small truth: “The earth is round”
The opposite of the above statement is: “The earth is flat". As the first one is a truth – albeit a small truth – its opposite has to be a falsehood. Therefore, the earth is not flat, and we can assert this categorically.
The interesting and important conclusion that Bohr and others reached about the nature of the electron is that the above logic does not apply in its case. For example, take the simple statement: “The electron is a particle”. The opposite of this is “The electron is not a particle”. Bohr and his team reached the conclusion that BOTH the above statements are correct – they convey a Great Truth.
At the level of logic, this seems absurd. But what Bohr tried to convey through his famous statement is that life is above logic. If we confine ourselves to logic, we can comprehend only the small truths – which have nothing to do with life. (Venky Ramachandran).
Albert Einstein conveyed the same point to his colleague Max Born in the following words:
“What applies to jokes, I suppose, also applies to pictures and to plays. I think they should not smell of a logical scheme, but of a delicious fragment of life, scintillating with various colours according to the position of the beholder. If one wants to get away from this vagueness one must take up mathematics. And even then one reaches one’s aim only by becoming completely insubstantial under the dissecting knife of clarity. Living matter and clarity are opposites – they run away from one another. We are now experiencing this rather tragically in physics.”
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the idea of truth, and how we so often tie ourselves in knots trying to make sense of everything through logic alone. But life is full of paradoxes - moments that seem to pull in opposite directions. We tend to feel we have to choose one side or the other, yet life becomes richer, more compassionate, and more joyful when we allow both to exist side by side.
