a joke about translating Bohr’s words

According to a later retelling, during Niels Bohr’s visit to Moscow’s Institute for Physical Problems, he said he was never embarrassed to admit to his students that “I am a fool.” Translator Evgeny Lifshitz supposedly rendered it as “they are fools,” and Pyotr Kapitsa joked that this reflected a difference between the Bohr and Landau schools. The story is known through later biographical retellings, but I found no reliable verbatim transcript of the meeting; it should be treated as an anecdote, not a verified transcript. The illustration is AI-generated.