Yesterday I was looking for some quotations for a data quality presentation.

I stumbled upon these ones by Niels Bohr:

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field

I found that this quote is most often used this way:

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field”.

I am pretty sure Bohr said person – not man. There are just as many female experts as male experts around.

And indeed: Learning from mistakes is the path to expertise in data quality.

There are two sorts of truth: Trivialities, where opposites are obviously absurd and profound truths, recognized by the fact that the opposite is also a profound truth

Bohr was into quantum mechanics. I think data quality is very much like quantum mechanics. Sometimes there is a simple single version of the truth; sometimes there are several great versions of a complex truth.

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it

Anyone who is not shocked by the actual quality of data has probably not measured it (yet).