"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 to me, and from then on I will know that Bohr was right but be unable to explain why to anybody else."

Mermin's dread was my invitation. He feared the insight might become unspeakable. I took that as a challenge to speak it anyway. If physics is about what can be said, then failure to say it is a bug, not a feature.

Models that contradict, on purpose

Here's the crux I missed while treating theories like rungs on a ladder to Truth: our best models clash. Newton's gravity bends to the invisible curving of spacetime as quantum field theory dissolves forces into particle exchanges. Each story is self‑consistent and gloriously useful inside its domain, and blatantly incompatible with the other's rules of the game. That is not a crisis to be resolved by a final winner‑take‑all narrative. It is the method.

Applied mathematics taught me this long before I admitted it out loud. Every model is a cartoon that erases almost everything so that one feature blazes in relief. Cartoons contradict because they ignore different details. Air resistance matters in aerodynamics, but it's a rounding error in orbital mechanics. Arguing which picture is "truer" misses the point. Utility is local. Truth — if the word still helps — is contextual.

Popular mythology imagines theories in gladiatorial combat — evolution beats creationism, relativity beats aether, quantum beats classical. The metaphor flatters our taste for drama but distorts the craft. Most of the time models don't duel — they diverge. They answer different questions at different resolutions, like maps of the same coastline drawn at one kilometer and one centimeter scales. Demanding they agree exactly is like demanding a haiku rhyme with a spreadsheet.

Why "wrong" is a feature

As an applied mathematician, being wrong is not a flaw but a professional obligation. We trim reality down to size, test the trimmed version, and — when new exigencies arise — trim it differently. Newton's gravity was wrong the day he published it — it is also how we slingshot spacecraft to Saturn. Wrongness, worn lightly, is power.

That's the lesson Bohr foreshadowed and Mermin almost sealed behind silence. Physics is not a single escalating narrative converging on the "One Final Theory." It is an anthology of mutually contradictory stories, each warranted by the slice of experience it clarifies. Progress is measured not by convergence but by proliferation — by the expanding collection of contexts in which we can say something coherent, predictive, and actionable.

So I choose to ignore Mermin's warning. I refuse the luxury of an ineffable epiphany. I write. I write because the only test of understanding is whether a thought survives the translation from brain‑buzz to public language. I write because stories, acknowledged as stories, keep us nimble, ready to swap metaphors when the problem changes scale.

In the end, Bohr's line is no mystical koan. It is operational advice: mind the grammar. The world is not inside our theories — our theories are inside our conversation. And conversations flourish when we accept a simple, liberating fact: we can — indeed, we must — tell many useful, incompatible tales at once, because reality is too generous to fit into one plot.

End of beginning

My reckoning is blunt: the only universal I can defend is story.

I choose, therefore, to be a careful storyteller — about physics, yes, but also about myself, my students, the strangers who read these words. If the universe permits only provisional plots, let's write the most generous versions we can manage, test them, revise them, and leave the next draft in kinder hands.

That's my story, and I'm not sticking to it.