Provenance
Where the anecdote actually appears
- Earliest match known to QI
- Svenska Dagbladet (Stockholm), January 1956, p. 8
- Closest early English wording
- “The Wit Parade,” E. E. Kenyon, Cleveland Plain Dealer (The American Weekly), 30 Sept. 1956, p. 13
- Bohr’s own writings
- No direct evidence located (Quote Investigator)
- Popular wording
- Not found in any documented account; a later paraphrase
“Of course not,” replied the scientist. “But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.”
1956 newspaper humor column
The 1956 “Wit Parade” humor column, as transcribed by Quote Investigator. Its “I understand… whether you believe in it or not” is the closest early match to the popular line, which turns “Of course not” into “Of course I don’t believe in it” and “it’s lucky” into “it brings you luck.”
Quote Investigator: I Understand It Brings You Luck, Whether You Believe in It or Not ↗
How the story traveled
- The earliest match known to Quote Investigator ↗ is a January 1956 item in the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet. It names Bohr, has an unnamed “curious American” ask about the horseshoe, and gives Bohr’s reply as “Of course not” in Swedish.
- On 30 September 1956, E. E. Kenyon’s “The Wit Parade” column ran the English line “But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not” (ADS-L, 2013 ↗). Later retellings use “I’ve been told,” “I am told it works” and “they say it helps.”
- In Werner Heisenberg’s Physics and Beyond, p. 92, as quoted on Wikiquote ↗, Bohr tells the story about a neighbor in Tisvilde who hung the horseshoe. The neighbor answers, “Of course not; but they say it helps even if you don’t believe in it.”
- Quote Investigator concludes: “QI has not located any direct evidence in the writings of Niels Bohr.” Wikiquote puts the anecdote under Disputed on its Bohr page ↗.
No identifiable work contains this exact wording. It is an anonymous modern paraphrase of a widely retold anecdote, so no rights status is asserted. The 1956 newspaper column and the later books that tell the story are separate works with their own rights.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Context
Why the story stuck to Bohr
The joke pokes fun at a rational person hedging with a lucky charm, and pinning it on the man who helped build quantum theory makes the irony sharper. Some later tellings, including Pais’s and Heisenberg’s, set it at Tisvilde, Bohr’s country retreat, but they disagree on whose door it was. Others put it at his home, on his lab door, at his country cabin or, with Einstein, in Princeton.
The first known print versions, from 1956, are a Swedish newspaper item and an American humor column. Those are the kinds of outlets where anecdotes about famous people get tidied up and passed along. The sentence quoted today is smoother than any of the early versions.
“But I understand it’s lucky whether you believe in it or not.” — humor column, 1956