Nobel prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr loved poetry, literature, and philosophy because they emphasized individual, subjective experience—which would prove crucial to his work on quantum theory:

"'When it comes to atoms,' Bohr wrote, 'language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connection.'

This remark links the poet and the physicist as imaginative beings. Bohr's education is no doubt behind the fact that he links his own work to the poet's work.

The physicist loved poetry, especially the poems of Goethe, and he strongly identified himself with the great German artist and intellectual.

Bohr continually quoted literary artists he admired. He read Dickens passionately and liked to conjure vivid pictures for entities in physics—electrons as billiard balls or atoms as plum puddings with jumping raisins—a proclivity that no doubt lies behind his idea that images serve physics as well as poetry. I find that images are extremely helpful for understanding ideas, and for many people a plum pudding with animated raisins is more vivid than images of tapes of code or hardware and software.

It is not surprising either that Bohr felt a kinship with his fellow Dane Søren Kierkegaard, a philosopher who was highly critical of every totalizing intellectual system and of science itself when it purported to explain everything. For Kierkegaard, objectivity as an end in itself was wrongheaded, because it left out the single individual and subjective experience."

—Siri Hustvedt, from 'A Woman Looking at Men Looking at (2016)