Question

Consider: This Quote on the Nucleus: Neils Bohr (a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922) said to Wolfgang Pauli (an Austrian-born Swiss and American theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics) after his presentation of Heisenberg’s and Pauli’s nonlinear field theory of elementary particles at Columbia University in 1958:

"We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."

You are asked to think of this quote in a scientific context.

Answer 1

Neils Bohr was one of the pioneer of the quantum mechanics in the early nineteenth century. The theory though started giving accurate description to every known phenomenon till date, its basic postulates are so fundamentally different from our perspective and sense of reality that it shocked almost everybody. The basic problem with quantum mechanics is that it is way beyond our intuition and sense yet it describes every phenomenon accurately. Hence many of the scientists even the Great Einstein was not very sure of quantum mechanics to be complete theory until his last day. But Neils Bohr belonged to the other group of scientists who embraced quantum mechanics without being too critical about its weird postulates and results. Hence he knew that any theory related to this branch of physics which is beyond our limited human perception, judgement and sense must contain brave assumptions, unbelievable results and audaciously bold statements. The theory should be strange enough that on first hearing any person should dismiss it as a crazy theory.

   Now in general, when a scientist makes some groundbreaking discovery, it should be completely new. If people on hearing about it don't get thrilled or don't suspect than it is highly likely that those theories and results were already known to the community. Hence, Bohr tried to say in this celebrated quote that any new discovery or theory should look crazy from at least outside or at first presentation for the sake of it's authenticity and possibility of opening new directions to the field.