Bohr Was Right — Story As The Last Universal Constant

“It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.” — Niels Bohr

I underlined say three times the first time I met that sentence. A decade of graduate courses insisted physics was the royal road to is, yet here was Bohr replacing ontology with rhetoric. I shelved the disquiet and marched on… symmetries, path integrals, decoherence, the usual theoretical pilgrimage. But the line kept humming in the margins.

Years later — while I was outlining a popular‐science book, not a journal paper — the humming crescendoed. The moment I tried to translate a quantum argument into plain prose, the words fought back. Equations compress, sentences refuse. And in that refusal, Bohr’s edict clicked. The enterprise is linguistic before it is mechanical. We traffic in stories.

As I read Bohr — and those who read Bohr — I stumbled on David Mermin’s confession:

“I have been getting sporadic flashes of feeling that I may actually be starting to understand what Bohr was talking about. Sometimes the sensation persists for many minutes. It’s a little like a religious experience and what really worries me is that if I am on the right track, then one of these days, perhaps quite soon, the whole business will suddenly become obvious…