The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

The reason both could be accepted as valid is that “particles” and “waves” are words, are abstractions. What we know is not particles and waves but the equipment of our experiments and how that equipment changes in experimental use. The equipment is large, the interiors of atoms small, and between the two must be interposed a necessary and limiting translation. The solution, Bohr went on, is to accept the different and mutually exclusive results as equally valid and stand them side by side to build up a composite picture of the atomic domain. Nur die Fülle führt zur Klarheit: only wholeness leads to clarity. Bohr was never interested in an arrogant reductionism. He called instead—the word appears repeatedly in his Como lecture—for “renunciation,” renunciation of the godlike determinism of classical physics where the intimate scale of the atomic interior was concerned.496