Einstein, stop telling God what to do!

The line is commonly invoked as a sharp, humorous rebuke to Einstein’s insistence that quantum mechanics must conform to classical intuitions of determinism and locality—an insistence often summarized by Einstein’s own quip that “God does not play dice.” In that popular framing, Bohr’s retort means: nature is not obliged to match our preferred metaphysical picture; physics should follow what experiments compel, even if the resulting theory is probabilistic and counterintuitive. More broadly, it captures a methodological stance associated with Bohr: avoid imposing a priori demands on reality, and accept the limits of what can be meaningfully said within a given experimental arrangement.