Every Sentence I Utter Must Be

Niels Bohr made this remark in conversations recorded by his assistant Aage Petersen, reflecting his lifelong view that science is fundamentally a linguistic activity — a matter of finding the right words to describe phenomena that lie at the limits of ordinary language. His famous principle of complementarity — that particles exhibit both wave and particle properties depending on how they are observed — was for Bohr as much a philosophical statement about language and description as a physical claim.