The Two Not Had Together Is Not Clumsiness

The Book of Bohr 2 · Written by himself, from his collected essays and his open letter to the United Nations

Niels Bohr, born at Copenhagen in 1885, died at Copenhagen in 1962. In 1913 he set out a new account of the atom: the electron sits only in certain orbits, and light comes out when it jumps — the spectral lines the old mechanics could not compute became computable. He took the Nobel in 1922. In 1921 he founded the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Copenhagen, and for twenty years afterwards nearly everyone working on the quantum spent some time living there. In 1927 he set out complementarity: of one and the same thing, two ways of asking each get one side, both sides true, and the two cannot be asked at once. In 1943, with the Germans about to seize the Jews, he escaped by fishing boat to Sweden and was flown to Britain in the bomb bay of a wooden aircraft; there was no oxygen in the bay and the helmet did not fit his head, and he lost consciousness on the way. In 1950 he wrote an open letter to the United Nations arguing that nations should deal with one another in the open. Three of this scripture’s six axioms — the Axiom of Observation, the Axiom of the Question, and the Axiom of What Cannot Both Be Had — come from what he and his circle saw, and chapters one to three of this book are their ground; the fourth — the Axiom of One Source — is bound to him as well, and by a crooked road: in 1935 Einstein and two colleagues wrote a paper meant to overturn his account, and the thing they held up in it as absurd is the fourth axiom of this scripture. He answered it the same year. The two of them argued about it for thirty years (cf. The Book of Einstein). The earlier books put them in ancient mouths — not because the ancients knew, but because the few sentences the ancients did say only found their footing here. The Order records this plainly rather than covering it: a chosen belief is carried with its label on (cf. The Rule 9.14), and this scripture is not exempt from its own rule. The first three chapters are the hardest reading in this scripture. The Order will not make them easy for the reader, and does not expect anyone to have them in one pass. Chapters four onward are about how he lived; they may be read first, but they cannot stand in for the first three.

2.1You have likely heard it put this way: you look at it and thereby jog it, so the two cannot both be had.

2.2That is easy to follow, but it makes the matter small, and it makes it wrong.

2.3On that account the trouble is heavy-handedness. Then a lighter hand and a finer instrument should get you both.

2.4They will not. In ten thousand years, with an instrument ten thousand times finer, they still will not.

2.5The real ground lies elsewhere. To get the one answer you must set up one arrangement; to get the other you must set up another.

2.6And the two arrangements cannot stand at the same time. Not for want of room, but because what each requires is the contrary of what the other requires.

2.7One must hold the thing still before it can be said where it is. The other must let it run before it can be said where it is going.

2.8What is held does not run; what runs is not held. This is not two matters that happen not to fit. It is one matter whose halves exclude each other.

2.9So what is lacking is not your care. What is lacking is an arrangement that could be both at once, and there is no such arrangement. (cf. The Highest Covenant 3.2)

2.10I said this all my life. Most people, some while after hearing it, go back to the jogging account.

2.11I know why. Jogging leaves them a hope: not good enough yet. The real ground leaves no such hope.

2.12Now one thing that grows out of this, which you will use in ordinary days.

2.13Truth and clarity are such a pair.

2.14The clearer you make a sentence, the more it leaves behind. The truer you make it, the less sharp it becomes.

2.15Every sharp sentence is sharp because something was cut away.

2.16I am not telling you to be unclear. I am telling you to know, as you make it clear, what you have just cut away, and that this was the price you paid.

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