A lifelong quantum quest

Kang-Kuen Ni

A. O. Barut, Alwyn van der Merwe, Jean Pierre Vigier

Lauren Peters

HyoWon Kim, Ayoung Lee, Si-Yeon Pak +2 more

Hyo-Won Kim, Ayoung Lee, Si-Yeon Pak, DaeHan Ahn, Lifelong Member, KIICE, and Jin-Ho Chung, Lifelong Member, KIICE. Journal of information and communication convergence engineering 2025;23:155-61. https://doi.org/10.56977/jicce.2025.23.3.155

Huiwn Helen Zhang

This article explores the physicist Niels Bohr’s cosmopolitan vision through the lens of his foundational complementarity principle. Bohr’s coat of arms—combining a Latin motto with the yin-yang symbol—stands as a visual manifesto of his lifelong quest to reconcile opposites. Archival research and textual analysis illuminate how Bohr transformed Chinese classics into epistemological allegories, reviving ancient ideas to bridge science and humanities. Tracing a thread from Bohr’s retelling of a Song‑dynasty tale to illustrate quantum mechanics, through his fusion of Schiller’s Confucius poems with Kierkegaard’s philosophy, to his 1937 dialogue in China on Zhuangzi’s “Joy of the Fish” and Princeton’s “identical twins” parables, this article weaves cross‑cultural encounters into constellations of complementarity. At the heart of these constellations lies my most surprising discovery: Bohr’s spectator‑actor analogy which he attributed to Laozi—sprang from the Danish recreation of the Daodejing, not the Chinese original. Unfolding this discovery maps out a multilayered migration of ideas through a practice I term “transreading.” In an era of disciplinary fragmentation, this article reveals an intellectual history in which science and humanities co‑create meaning. Bohr’s vision affirms a timely truth: the future of knowledge depends on the courage and imagination to transread across cultures and worlds.

Alex Montwill, Ann Breslin