The Logos Scripture · The Book of Bohr
The Book of Bohr 5 · 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.