Great Truth and their Contraries
Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Thu, 25 Nov 1999 18:20:27 -0800
>Niels Bohr, who declared that a great truth is a statement whose
>opposite is also a great truth.
Sorry, this is a great stupidity.
Of course, by its own tenets that would make it also a great wisdom.
It is a great truth that the earth orbits the sun. It is a great error (one
believed in mistake for hundreds of thousands of years) that the sun orbits
the earth (or, more strictly, that the earth does *not* orbit the sun). No
prevarications about common centres of gravity deep inside the sun, please.
Bohr's metaphysics lent mystification to much of his scientific work, which
might well have retarded our understanding of QT for generations.
Damien Broderick