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Niels Bohr Atom
Niels Bohr Atom
Bohr
Revised Edition
Niels
Bohr
Atomic Theorist
Revised Edition
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Contents
Preface x
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction xiv
Chronology 117
Glossary 121
Further Resources 125
Index 135
Preface
Preface xi
new facts are constantly flowing in, scientists are continually refining
their work to account for as many facts as possible. So science can
make mistakes, but it also can correct itself.
Sometimes, as medical scientist Jonas Salk liked to point out,
good science thrives when scientists ask the right question about
what they observe. What people think of as the moment of discov-
ery is really the discovery of the question, he once remarked.
There is no one, step-by-step scientific method that all scien-
tists use. However, science requires the use of methods that are sys-
tematic, logical, and empirical (based on objective observation and
experience). The goal of science is to explore and understand how
nature workswhat causes the patterns, the shapes, the colors, the
textures, the consistency, the mass, and all the other characteristics
of the natural universe that we see.
What is it like to be a scientist? Many people think of stereotypes
of the scientist trapped in cold logic or the cartoonlike mad scien-
tists. In general, these portrayals are more imagination than truth.
Scientists use their brains. They are exceptionally good at logic and
critical thinking. This is where the generalizations stop. Although
science follows strict rules, it is often guided by the many styles and
personalities of the scientists themselves, who have distinct individu-
ality, personality, and style. What better way to explore what science
is all about than through the experiences of great scientists?
Each volume of the Makers of Modern Science series presents the
life and work of a prominent scientist whose outstanding contribu-
tions have garnered the respect and recognition of the world. These
men and women were all great scientists, but they differed in many
ways. Their approaches to the use of science were different: Niels
Bohr was an atomic theorist whose strengths lay in patterns, ideas,
and conceptualization, while Wernher von Braun was a hands-on
scientist/engineer who led the team that built the giant rocket used by
Apollo astronauts to reach the Moon. Somes genius was sparked by
solitary contemplationgeneticist Barbara McClintock worked alone
in fields of maize and sometimes spoke to no one all day long. Others
worked as members of large, coordinated teams. Oceanographer
Robert Ballard organized oceangoing ship crews on submersible
expeditions to the ocean floor; biologist Jonas Salk established the
xii Niels Bohr
xiii
Introduction
xiv
Introduction xv
Niels Bohr
institution and the ability of the faculty and students will permit,
with the emphasis, from the beginning, on the word advanced.
Although the founders had envisioned a kind of supergraduate
school, where the brightest faculty minds would be free to pursue
their own studies while teaching only a hand-picked group of gradu-
ate students, in reality the institute never enrolled a single graduate
student. Its students, instead, were its own brilliant and gifted
members, an international community, all holders of the highest
degrees and honors, the best scientific minds in the world. Freed from
nonacademic distractions and responsibilities, the institutes mem-
bers could concentrate solely on their own work, and they eagerly
listened to and taught not undergraduate or graduate students, but
one another, exchanging ideas with the best of their peers.
Not surprisingly, the institute drew many of the worlds fin-
est scientific and scholarly minds, both for long-term stays and
shorter visits. In 1947 the father of the Atomic Bomb, J. Robert
Oppenheimer, had become the institutes third director. Under his
leadership, as under the two previous directors, the big comfortable
offices in Fuld Hall continued to be a thriving beehive of esoteric and
often bewildering intellectual activity.
On that particular late-winter afternoon in 1948, perhaps its
most prestigious resident member was Albert Einstein.
The young mathematics professor just in from the cold hurried
through the office corridors with his armload of books and his hair
still mussed from the wind, glancing in the open door of Einsteins
cluttered office. He had promised to drop off some papers, but no
one was in. He would drop them off later.
On another floor, in another part of the building, Einstein
was also on the minds of two other men. The younger of the two,
Abraham Pais, a young scientist wearing horn-rimmed glasses, sat at
his desk, watching. The other, an older man with a large stocky frame
and the drooping face of a big, friendly bulldog, paced the room.
The older man muttered softly, his thick Danish accent making his
words almost unintelligible. He was visibly upset. He had jammed
the pipe he usually smoked into his pocket, and he seemed to be
struggling even more than usual for the right words. Finding them
hardly seemed a relief.
The Making of a Physicist
felt so terribly strongly about, who would never see the world in the
way that Bohr saw it. Einstein, who would continue to go his lonely
and individual way.
The big Dane shrugged his bulky and still-athletic shoulders. He
would never win Einstein over. Never. Never! And yet ... And yet ...
The young mathematics professor dumped his armload of books
onto his desk. He was running late and was in a hurry to wrap up
his errands and get home for dinner. The wind was blowing harder
and was rattling the window of his office. A storm was coming and
he didnt like his wife to drive in bad weather. If he could get back
downstairs, he could catch her in time before she parked the car and
came looking for him in the building.
He caught a movement in the corner of his eye. Glancing up,
he saw the familiar shaggy-haired figure walk past the open door.
He started to call out, checking his desk to make certain that he still
had the papers Einstein had asked him to pick up. When he looked
up again, he could no longer see the baggy gray sweater. He debated
with himself briefly. Did you chase Albert Einstein? He moved to the
door and looked out into the corridor, but he had acted too slowly.
The shaggy figure had vanished around a corner.
Outside the institute, the skies had darkened and the wind had
picked up. Lights were going on in many of the offices. In a window
on one of the upper floors, Niels Bohr stood silently staring out at
the wind-swept grounds.
A dozen windows away, another light flicked on. Packing the
pipe that his doctors had forbidden him to smoke with tobacco he
had borrowed from one of the other offices, Albert Einstein moved
to the window and stared out.
On the grounds below a horn honked. The car door opened for
the hurried young professorand Einstein and Bohr returned to their
thoughts. They would still be puzzling for hours to come. Neither
would sleep well that night. And tomorrow they would try again.
What was this argument all about, an argument that engaged two
of the most brilliant scientists of the twentieth century in a heated
debate that Robert Oppenheimer once called the richest and deep-
est dialogue since Platos Parmenides? A debate about nothing less
than the nature of reality. And who was Niels Bohr, this tenacious
The Making of a Physicist
but gentle bulldog of a man who for over two decades engaged in this
great intellectual debate with Albert Einstein?
Conversations Overheard
Bohr had learned the technique as a child, sitting with his brother
on the floor of the family living room in Copenhagen and listening
to his father and his friends talk. It was not just ordinary everyday
conversation that Niels and his brother Harald listened to. Their
father, Christian, was a professor of physiology at the University of
Copenhagen, an articulate and famous physician deeply interested in
science, art, and philosophy; his friends were among the intellectual
elite of Copenhagen.
Christian Bohr was politically and socially progressive. Considered
somewhat radical in his time, he was a religious skeptic and an early
advocate of womens rights. But he still held a deep reverence for the
past and its great thinkers. One of his particular favorites was the
German philosopher Goethe, whose writings he often read aloud to
his children. He was also a sports enthusiast who kept up with all of
the latest scores in English football (soccer) games and was instru-
mental in introducing soccer, then little known in Denmark, to a
wider audience.
The lively Bohr household was kept running smoothly by Nielss
mother, Ellen, a gentle woman whose quick intelligence and loving
nature embraced not only the immediate family but the many visi-
tors who came to the Bohr home. As a result, Niels and his siblings
grew up in an intellectual and social center for many of Copenhagens
liveliest minds.
Nielss father was also the son of a teacher, Henrik George
Christian BohrNielss paternal grandfatherwho had headed an
elementary school on the island of Bornholm, in the Baltic Sea south
of Sweden. Christian was born in Copenhagen in 1855 and published
his first scientific paper at the age of twenty-two, taking his medical
The Making of a Physicist
Family life and intellectual conversation were important to the Bohr family. Here, at age
four, Niels Bohr (right) sits for a portrait with (left to right) his sister, Jenny, his brother,
Harald (on his mothers lap), and Ellen Adler Bohr. (Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen)
degree in 1878 and receiving his Ph.D. in physiology two years later.
In 1881 he married one of his students, Ellen Adler, the daughter of
a prosperous Jewish banker and politician. Their first child, Nielss
elder sister, Jenny, was born on March 9, 1883. Their second child,
Niels Henrik David Bohr, followed soon after, on October 7, 1885.
The third, Nielss beloved younger brother, Harald, was born on
April 22, 1887.
Christian and Ellen spent portions of the early years of their
marriage in the large and stately town house owned by the Adler
family at 14 Ved Stranden in the heart of Copenhagen. Here Jenny
and Niels were born. It was a charming place, surrounded by tiny
Niels Bohr
Close friends from boyhood through adulthood, Niels Bohr (right) and his brother,
Harald, are shown here as students. (Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen)
12 Niels Bohr
Leucippus and his student, Democritus, first described it. All matter,
they said, was made of fundamental particles that could not be split
into parts. They called these particles atoms. (The Greek word
atomos means indestructible.) These tiny, indestructible particles
were the very essence of matter, they said. And each element, such
as gold, silver, hydrogen, and so on, represented a single substance
composed entirely of only one type of atom. Over the centuries this
atomic theory seemed to fit experimental results consistently, and by
the early 19th century most scientists had concluded that it depicted
an accurate view of reality. By 1895 about 76 of these elements were
known, and a Russian scientist by the name of Dmitry Mendeleyev
had observed common traits among some of them when he arranged
them by atomic weight (the weight of a single atom of an element).
He called the arrangement he came up with the Periodic Table of
Elements. With only a few alterations, his periodic table is still in
use today.
But now J. J. Thomson measured his electrons and found that
they were much lighter than hydrogen atoms, the very smallest atom
of all. (His first measurement put the new particle at 1/770th the
mass of hydrogen, but a later measurement of 1/1840th proved more
accurate.) However, according to the prevailing atomic theory, noth-
ing could be smaller than the hydrogen atom. He also found that it
didnt matter whether the cathode tube contained a vacuum or was
pumped with any kind of gas you could imagine. His electrons were
always the same.
Meanwhile, Rntgens discovery intrigued Henri Becquerel, a
Parisian expert on fluorescence, which is the natural tendency of
some substances to glow. Becquerel knew that sunlight can induce
fluorescence in some substances, and he decided to try some experi-
ments with various materials. He decided to begin with a uranium
salt, but met with a series of cloudy days and so, to save the materi-
als for a sunny day, he wrapped the uranium substance in paper and
stuck the package in a drawer with the unexposed photographic
plates. When he retrieved the materials, he was amazed to find that
the uranium salt had exposed the photographic plates, even though
the salt was completely hidden from any light. He had discovered,
quite by accident, that some substances give off another ray, similar to
X-rays, but not the same. The year was 1898. Marie Curie, a talented
The Making of a Physicist 15
young physicist working in Paris at the time, gave the name radioac-
tivity to this newfound emanation.
The implications of these discoveries, when closely examined,
set late 19th-century science into a great stir. Where did these rays
come from? What were they? Thomson had already assailed the idea
that atoms were the smallest unit of matter. Now, with the discovery
of radioactivity, the Greek atom was called even more into question.
Where could these rays be coming from other than from the atoms
themselves? If pure samples of an element could emit rays, the atoms
must be disintegrating in some way; that is, the rays must be com-
posed of part of the atom. But atoms, by the old Greek definition,
had no parts. An atom, according to Leucippus and Democritus,
was unsplittable. With the discoveries of Thomson, Rntgen, and
Becquerel, the ancient Greek view of the atom as solid and unsplit-
table had come to an end.
This was the kind of dilemma physics was facing when Niels
Bohr prepared his paper on radioactivity. He had picked out the
very area of physics that was at that moment just ready to burst into
hundreds of new avenues of investigation.
at Gttingen, where the most advanced work in his field was taking
place. Niels, who was still laboring over his thesis in June 1909, was
both a little jealous and very proud.
Upon his return to Denmark, Niels Bohr and Margrethe Nrlund married. This is a photo-
graph taken at the time of their engagement in 1911. They were close companions for
the rest of their lives. (Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen)
The Making of a Physicist 17
Once again, for Niels, writing the thesis would require getting
away from the temptation to continue researching and experiment-
ing. Upon his grandmothers death, her home at Naerumgaard had
been given away by the Adler family to become a childrens home, so
it was no longer available as a retreat. Niels went instead to a vicar-
age located on the island of Fyn, one of the main islands of Denmark.
It was the home of the father of Christian Bohrs assistant, Holgar
Mollgaard, and it turned out to offer the isolation and opportunity
for focus that Niels needed for his writing. There he pored over the
books and articles of Thomson, as well as publications by Paul Drude
and Lorentz. He succeeded in homing in on assumptions and uncov-
ered a few discrepancies in Lorentzs work (as he wrote parentheti-
cally in a letter to Harald, you know I have the bad habit of thinking
I can find mistakes in others). Bohrs innate ability to question and
put his finger on fundamental assumptions had already become an
important part of his scientists bag of tools.
Just after submitting his masters thesis, Niels took a holiday
to visit a friend, Niels Erik Nrlund, a member of the discussion
group that he and Harald had formed. There he met his friends
sister, Margrethe Nrlund, an intelligent, warm young woman with
a serene strength and a more than passing interest in science. Niels
had met his life partner, and he knew it at once.
As a lifelong friend, Richard Courant, wrote many decades
later, after Nielss death, It was not luck, rather deep insight, which
led him to find in young years his wife, who ... had such a decisive
role in making his whole scientific and personal activity possible
and harmonious.
Margrethe would become his partner in every way. Their hap-
piness together was always apparent to those who knew them, and
their marriage, which would last over 50 years, was unique. As one
biographer put it, Not only by the strength of her great personal-
ity and by her knowledge and ability in so many differing fields, but
especially by her devotion, Margrethe Bohr became the perfect and
indispensable support to her husband.
With the beginning of the school year in the fall of 1909, Harald
returned from Gttingen to continue his Ph.D. studies, and the
two brothers often studied together. Niels also began work on his
18 Niels Bohr
20
The Making of a Physicist 21
J. J. Thomson, who discovered the electron, invited Bohr to come to England to study
at Cambridge University.
(Original portrait by Arthur Hacker, A. R. A., courtesy AIP Emilio Segr Visual Archives)
NielsBohr
J. J., who was 56 at the time, had already been head of the
Cavendish for 27 yearshaving taken the place of Lord Rayleigh
at the age of 28. He was only the third head of the prestigious
laboratorythe first director had been James Clerk Maxwell.
Thomson was an intense-looking man who wore wire-rimmed glass-
es and a slightly drooping mustache. His hair, a bit long, swept across
the crown, and his proper tweed coat and winged collar tended to
look disheveled, the requisite tie and cuff links in place but, like his
cluttered desk, not necessarily in order. But, for all his erudition and
famehe had won the Nobel Prize only five years earlier for his work
on the electron and was knighted in 1908his manner was genuine-
ly warm and sociable. As Niels Bohr made his way along the darkly
paneled halls of the Cavendish Laboratory and entered Thomsons
Interlude in Cambridge
During his leisure hours in Cambridge, Niels called on former
students of his fathers, attended teas and gatherings sponsored
by the ladies of the English academic community, read the works
of Charles Dickens with dictionary in hand to improve his English
(remembering the Dickens stories his father used to read when he
was a boy), and enjoyed long walks through the countryside.
After one of these autumn excursions, he wrote enthusiastically
to Margrethe, . . . and then I went on the loveliest walk for an hour
before dinner across most beautiful meadows along the river, with
the hedges ecked with red berries and with isolated wind-blown
willow-treesjust imagine all this under the most magnicent autumn
sky with scurrying clouds and blustering wind . . .
Always athletic, Bohr also joined a soccer club and, as the weather
got colder, enjoyed ice skating. Harald came for a visit at Christmas.
But as far as physics went, Bohr spent his time working on a
lusterless project on cathode ray production, suggested by Thomson.
It was not going well and seemed to hold little promise of yielding
fruitful results. Try as he might to sound upbeat in his letters, he
became restless. No one he knew in England understood Danish, and
Bohrs usual roundabout way of speaking and his soft voice didnt help
MysteriesoftheAtom
office, he might have been overcome with a sense of awe, had it not
been for his new mentors disarmingly friendly manner.
Two early models of the atom. In 1898, J. J. Thomson derived a model of the atom (left)
based on his discovery of the electron. He asserted that atoms were spheres of positively
charged matter with negatively charged electrons embedded in themsomething like
raisins in pound cake. In 1911, Ernest Rutherford came up with the idea that each atom
consisted of a tiny positive nucleus (right) with electrons circling somewhere outside it.
together a new idea of the atom: What if all the positively charged
particles in the atom were not spread like a fluid throughout the
atom, but lumped together in the center in one tiny core area? This
nucleus (a term he came up with in 1912) was thousands of times
heavier than an electron, so most of the atoms mass would be con-
tained there, composed of positively charged particles. An equal
number of negatively charged electrons would be found in motion
somewhere outside the nucleus. The rest of the atom would be
empty space. If the nucleus was the size of a marble, sitting in the
center of the field in an empty football stadium, its electrons would
be perched on the outer walls of the stadium. It was a compelling
ideaa sort of tiny planetary system that mirrored the larger solar
system we live in. In the bombardment experiments, most of the
bombarding alpha particles would pass straight through the com-
paratively vast areas of empty space. But a few would hit the nucleus
Mysteries of the Atom 29
The periodic table of the elements provides a scheme for organizing the elements and
their attributes in an easily referenced display.
34 Niels Bohr
37
38 Niels Bohr
but the ceremony itself was only two minutes long, performed by the
chief of police, before members of the immediate family. Harald was
the best man. When Niels heard that Margrethes mother had planned
a three-hour wedding dinner, he exclaimed, How is it really possible
to take three hours for a dinner? Cant we take the ferry at 7:00?
The ferry Niels was so eager to catch would cross the Store Baelt
from the island of Sjaelland to the Danish mainland to start the new
couple out on the first leg of their honeymoon trip to England, where
they stopped off in Cambridge. There Bohr completed his paper on
the absorption of alpha particles. When he reached Manchester on
August 12, he handed Rutherford his manuscript for publication in
Philosophical Magazine. In Manchester, Margrethe met Ernest and
Mary Rutherford, who were nearly as enchanted by her as Niels was,
delighted that he had found someone so perfectly his match. The
four became great friends.
Margrethe and Niels returned to Denmark in September, where
they settled into their new life together in Copenhagen. Bohr carried
the whirlwind style of his childhood and youth into his adult years.
As he had written to Harald from Manchester, I have so many things
that I should like to try ... One longtime friend, Jens Rud Nielsen,
looking back on that period from 1912 to 1913, recalled, He would
come into the yard, pushing his bicycle, faster than anybody else. He
was an incessant worker and seemed always to be in a hurry.
As far as prospects for an academic career were concerned, Bohr
clearly realized that, even with a fine record, he had to apply consider-
able energy if he hoped to have any position at all in his homeland, in
a field as esoteric as physics. Denmark, after all, was a small country,
and at that time the University of Copenhagen was its only university.
Only one professorship in physics existed, and that one wasnt open.
Fortunately, he had thought ahead, knowing he might need sev-
eral tries to get his foot in the door. Shortly after he received his doc-
torate, in the summer of 1911, he applied for a docentship (a much
lower paid position) in physics. He was turned down. Then, during
his stay in England, he heard that his former professor, Christian
Christiansen, was resigning, effective August 31, 1912. Bohr applied,
even though he knew that the position was much more likely to go
to Martin Knudsen, a docent who had far greater seniority. Again
Bohr was turned down. Knudsen received the appointment and
Birth of Bohrs Atom 39
This display shows emission spectra for sodium, mercury, helium, and hydrogen. Each
element displays a unique discrete spectrum, an identity marker almost like a finger-
print. This fact puzzled scientists for years until Bohr came up with his model of the
atom. Bohr suggested that electrons release energy only while making jumps from one
orbit to another (explaining the discrete spectral lines emitted by the elements). He
surmised that the electrons move only in certain allowed orbits at specific distances
from the nucleus of each element.
Bohr had met Nicholson and did not think much of his abilities, but
what startled him was that Nicholson had proposed an explanation
for an unusual spectrum in the corona of the Sun by suggesting a
model of the atom that used quantum principles. Nicholson had
made mistakes, but Bohr began to worry about competition. He had
hold of such an exciting idea, and he hoped he would have time to
work it out in detail and publish before someone else got there. So
Nicholsons paper threw more fuel on an already intensely burning
BirthofBohrsAtom
had observed that certain spectra were associated with the atoms of
certain elements, but they had never been able to explain why.
Some had found some fascinating mathematical regularities,
however. In 1885, Johann Balmer, a mathematical physicist from
Switzerland, had found a formula for calculating the wavelengths of
the spectral lines of hydrogen. Five years later Johannes Rydberg, a
Swedish spectroscopist (a specialist in producing and studying spec-
tral lines), came up with a general formula that could be used to calcu-
late several different line spectra. But these mathematical harmonies
served only to deepen the mystery; they offered no explanation.
With his model of the atom, Bohr set out to explain why. He real-
ized that the radius of an electrons orbit was determined by Plancks
constant. That meant that the amount of energy also was fixed. An
electron in a permissible orbit did not emit any radiation; normally it
occupied a stable, basic orbit that Bohr called a ground state.
But if energy was added to the atom, if it was heated, for
example, the electron would respond by jumping from one orbit
to anotherand when it did that, it changed energy states. In
response to heat, it would jump to a higher orbit, one farther from
the nucleus. If the heat was turned higher, the electron would keep
jumping to higher and higher orbits. If it was cooled off, the electron
would jump inward to a lower orbit, closer to the nucleus. Moving
to a larger orbit, it would absorb energy; moving to a smaller one, it
would emit energy. When energy no longer was added, the electron
would return to its ground state.
Bohr did the calculations for hydrogens single electron. He
worked out the energies involved for jumping from one orbit that
was permissible to another. He calculated the light wavelengths that
would be produced if the energy was converted to light. It worked!
His calculations matched the spectrum of hydrogen, which always
before had been a mystery.
This is what he came up with: Each electron emits a photon
(a quantum of light) of characteristic energy, or frequency. The
jumpsand the photon energiesare limited by Plancks constant.
If the lower-energy state (when the atom is cool and the electron
is close to the nucleus) is called W1, and the higher-energy state
is called W2, you can subtract W2 from W1 and the result is hv
Birth of Bohrs Atom 47
(Plancks constant, h, times the frequency, v). Bohr saw this and,
using the formula W2 - W1 = hv, he was able to come up with
Balmers series. He also found that with a slightly more complex
formula, using nonarbitrary numbers, representing the mass of the
electron, its charge, and Plancks constant, he could come up with
Rydbergs experimental values!
48 Niels Bohr
Fate of a Paper:
... Atoms and Molecules
As always, Bohr had great difficulty bringing his paper to conclu-
sion. It was getting too long for publication in any journal. Finally he
decided to divide it up into three parts. (For this reason, it usually is
referred to as the trilogy.) After Bohr had finally finished Part I, On
the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules, he anxiously sent it off to
Rutherford on March 6, 1913, and held his breath. In the meantime,
he continued to write and rewrite the other two parts.
When Rutherfords letter, dated March 20, finally arrived, Bohr
tore it open and scanned it quickly. With the first sentence, he
breathed a great sigh of relief.
I have received your paper safely and read it with great inter-
est, wrote Rutherford, but I want to look over it again carefully
when I have more leisure. Your ideas as to the mode of origin of the
spectrum of hydrogen are very ingenious and seem to work out well.
But Rutherfords role was to critique and so he did: ... but the mix-
ture of Plancks ideas with the old mechanics make it very difficult
to form a physical idea of what is the basis of it. And a bit later, he
raised a thorny question in a characteristically direct way:
There appears to me one grave difficulty in your hypothesis,
which I have no doubt you fully realize, namely, how does an
electron decide what frequency it is going to vibrate at when
it passes from one stationary state to the other? It seems to
me that you would have to assume that the electron knows
beforehand where it is going to stop.
Overall, though, Rutherford thought the paper should go off to
the Philosophical Magazine. He offered to clean up the English for
Bohr, and, since he thought it was much too long and wordy, he con-
cluded somewhat casually with the comment, I suppose you have
no objection to my using my judgment to cut out any matter I may
consider unnecessary in your paper? Please reply.
Bohr didnt know what to say in reply. He had labored over every
sentence, every word of the paper, and was certain that nothing could
be cut out without damaging the meaning drastically. But how could
he convey a hands-off message to Rutherford tactfully? Finally he
Birth of Bohrs Atom 49
wrote back that he would be glad for any alterations you consider
suitable, apologizing for any trouble he might have caused, and
then concluded offhandedly, I now have some holidays and I have
decided to come over to Manchester. It was a totally unplanned trip,
in fact, but it was the only way Bohr could see out of his dilemma.
When Bohr reached Manchester, he was greeted warmly and the
two sat right down to work, Rutherford with the idea that at least
one-third of the manuscript could be jettisoned. Bohr tenaciously
defended the existence of every sentence. Section by section they
went through the paper. Section by section Rutherford was won
over. In the end, he made only a few corrections to Bohrs English
and sent the paper off intact. Later, he loved to tell the story of Bohrs
bulldog defense of his words and how he had finally had to give in to
the gentle if tenacious Dane.
The second part in Bohrs 1913 trilogy bore the title Systems
Containing Only a Single Nucleus, and the third, Systems
Containing Several Nuclei. All three parts were published by the end
of 1913, and Bohrs trilogy became seminally important to physics. It
not only offered a highly useful model of the atom, but it showed that
quantum mechanics was a fundamental part of how nature worked.
While the mechanistic physics of Newton had worked well on larger
scales, it could not account for subtleties on the atomic scale. For this
work, Bohr would win the 1922 Nobel Prize in physics.
In 1913, Niels Bohr proposed a model of the atom with electrons confined to specific
circular orbits around the nucleus.
Einstein replied that Bohrs work seemed very interesting and impor-
tant if righta polite way of expressing skepticism. Then Hevesy
told him about the spectral lines, and Einstein brightened. This is
an enormous achievement, he said. The theory of Bohr must then
be right.
Many years later, when Einstein was almost 70, he wrote:
That this insecure and contradictory foundation [of physics in
the years from 1910 to 1920] was sufficient to enable a man of
Bohrs unique instinct and tact to discover the major laws of
the spectral lines and of the electron shells of the atoms togeth-
er with their significance for chemistry appeared to me like a
miracleand appears to me as a miracle even today. This is
the highest form of musicality in the sphere of thought.
Einstein and Bohr would not meet for another seven years, but
during the years that followed publication of Bohrs 1913 trilogy,
Einstein kept track of Bohrs work through his writings. He also
gathered news from a young physicist named Paul Ehrenfest, of
Amsterdam, who struck up a friendship with Bohr by letter in 1918.
In a postcard to Max Planck in 1919, Einstein wrote, Ehrenfest tells
me many details from Niels Bohrs Gedankenkche [thought kitch-
en]; his must be a first-rate mind, extremely critical and far-seeing,
which never loses track of the grand design.
Harald wrote from Gttingen that people were reading Nielss
work with interest, but many seemed to think his premises were
too fantastic and too bold. Meanwhile, Bohr spoke at a meeting
in Birmingham, England, on September 12, 1913, the first time he
presented his work at an international meeting. The write-up in the
journal Nature said, Dr. Bohr ... arrived at a convincing and bril-
liant explanation of the laws of spectral series.
By the winter of 1914, the University of Copenhagen, impressed
by now, invited him to submit his application for appointment as
professor of theoretical physics. It would be the first time that theo-
retical physics was taught at Copenhagen as a separate science, and
it was exactly what he wanted. Bohr submitted his application March
4 and wrote to Rutherford, asking for a recommendation, which
Rutherford sent back, filled with praise, by return mail. Approval by
the faculty was almost unanimous.
52 Niels Bohr
Back to Manchester
Premonitions of war were brewing in Germany at this time, but for
the most part, people thought war was unlikely, and Bohr couldnt
pass up an opportunity to work directly with Rutherford. He quickly
arranged with the University of Copenhagen to wait two years for
him and made preparations to head back to Manchester.
On June 28, 1914, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-
Hungary was assassinated by a Serb extremist. Austria-Hungary
issued an ultimatum to the Serbian government, and Germany prom-
ised support. Tensions that had been seething for years suddenly sent
the world to the brink of war. Russia mobilized against Austria, and
on August 1, Germany declared war on Russia. Denmark, as always,
was vulnerable. German and British fleets prowled the waters, and
one sea battle took place on August 28. Travel to Manchester now
looked risky.
But by September, although war in Europe continued, travel
between Denmark and England by sea again seemed safe, and the
Bohrs set out for Manchester. There Bohr produced another paper
for the Philosophical Magazine in 1915, On the Quantum Theory of
Radiation and the Structure of the Atom, strengthening the points
of his previous work. As before, the work in Manchester was exhila-
rating, intense, and always productive. To Bohr, it was an object les-
son in how he might run his own department of theoretical physics
in Copenhagen, when he returned.
By 1916, as Bohr was preparing his notes and papers to return
to Denmark, the war had grown grimmer. Rutherford sent a letter
with Bohr to protect his notes from confiscation, certifying that they
were intended for English scientific publication. Although the guns
in Europe roared on, the Bohrs returned safely home.
Papers by other scientists were beginning to come out that were
offshoots of Bohrs theory, and he was having to work hard to keep
Birth of Bohrs Atom 53
ahead. Three years had passed since his famous trilogy had been
published, and confirming experimental results were beginning to
pile up. So were the offers. Before the year was out, Bohr had received
an invitation from the University of California to spend a year there.
Soon after, the University of Manchester invited him to join its fac-
ulty. But the war made California an unlikely destination, and Bohr
asked Manchester to wait a few months for his decision. Meanwhile,
in November 1916, the Bohrs had their first son, Christian, an event
they both rejoiced in greatly. Five other children, all boys, would fol-
low in the years to come: Hans Henrik (born in 1918), Erik (1920),
Aage Niels (1922), Ernest David (1924, named after both their good
friend Rutherford and Nielss maternal grandfather), and Harald
(1928). Bohr loved his children and always managed to spend time
with them, despite his fast-paced schedule.
Throughout 1916, Bohr continued to work on publications, find-
ing them difficult to complete, as always, and he continued an active
correspondence with Rutherford, the news of whose research he
followed with great interest. But now his attention was also greatly
drawn to his teaching. At first his classes in theoretical physics drew
only a handful of advanced students, primarily those interested in
quantum theory. (Knudsen, the only other physics professor at the
university, had no use for quantum theory. One student who took
classes from both of them recalled Knudsens sharp response to a
question involving it: If we have to use quantum theory to explain
this, we may as well not explain it.) Gradually, as Bohr delved more
and more into atomic theory in his classes, faculty members began
turning up too. The discussions went deep and Bohr pushed his stu-
dents thinking, chalk in hand, furrowed brow, expectant smile, wait-
ing for the next thought. His was a kindly, responsive face. Abraham
Pais, a physicist from Holland who later became his biographer, once
wrote of his first meeting with Bohr, My first thought was, what a
gloomy face. But this first impression melted immediately. Those
who knew Bohr were captured by the sunny, warm smile and the
animation that came to his face when he talked.
By 1917 Bohr had approached the university about an idea he
hadthe establishment of a small institute for theoretical physics as
part of the university. Soon after the wars end, the plan was approved.
Bohr was able to raise about $20,000 toward the construction of a
54 Niels Bohr
Enter Einstein
Despite his busy schedule, when Max Planck invited him to go to
Berlin to lecture on spectral theory at the Physikalische Gesellschaft
(Physics Society), Bohr quickly agreed, and it was a decision he never
regretted. There, as he arrived at the Berlin physics building, Planck
and Albert Einstein came out to greet him. Planck looked formal and
proper, as he smiled warmly behind wire-rimmed glasses. Einstein,
with his wild halo of hair, never looked formal, on that day or any
56 Niels Bohr
other day. The three men began discussing atomic physics immedi-
ately and continued, morning to night, for the rest of the conference,
whenever they werent in meetings.
Einstein had formulated the general statistical rules for the elec-
tron jumps from one of Bohrs stationary states to another. These
jumps could occur, he said, not just in response to radiation or colli-
sion. They could occur spontaneously.
Bohr, meanwhile, suggested in his lecture on spectral theory that
an exact determination of where and when electrons jump could
not be made. This Einstein did not like. No theory should leave to
chance the time and determination of fundamental processes, he
maintained. Here, already, the two great minds began to take diver-
gent paths. Their conversations revolved around these themes and
left a deep impression on Bohr, as he continued to mull them over
in his thoughts.
With his mastery for coordinating apparently contrasting expe-
rience, Bohr later wrote, without abandoning continuity and cau-
sality, Einstein was perhaps more reluctant to renounce such ideals
than someone for whom renunciation ... appeared to be the only
way to proceed with the immediate task of coordinating the multi-
farious evidence regarding atomic phenomena.
Two days after the end of the conference, Einstein wrote to
Ehrenfest, Bohr was here, and I am as much in love with him as you
are. He is like an extremely sensitive child who moves around in this
world in a sort of trance.
And to Einstein, Bohr wrote, To meet you and talk with you was
one of the greatest experiences I ever had.
In September 1921, the inauguration of the Institute for
Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen took place, and Bohr became
its head at the age of 36. From the time the institute was built,
the Bohrs lived in a flat on the upper level of the research centers
only building. In 1924, Bohr bought a summer home as a retreat in
Tisvilde on the island of Sjaelland (where Copenhagen is located),
40 miles northwest of the Danish capital, near the shore of the
Kattegat strait, which lies between Denmark and Sweden. An old
gamekeepers home, the house was a one-story cottage with a
thatched roof. Its name was Lynghuset, meaning heather house,
and it was nestled among rolling hills dotted with heather shrubs
Birth of Bohrs Atom 57
The Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen was a single, lonely building waiting
for students at the time of its inauguration in 1921. (Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen)
and high pine forests. A small one-room cabin, which they called
Pavillonen (the pavilion), stood nearby the housethe perfect place
for Bohr and his colleagues to work undisturbed. The peaceful sur-
roundings of Tisvilde provided the Bohrs with the ideal summer
retreat, a much-needed place to get away from the pressures of their
intense daily life.
But from the start Bohrs life revolved around the new institute.
There, like a magnet, Bohr drew the best young minds from all over
the world. Georg von Hevesy, from his days at Manchester, was one
of the first of many foreigners Bohr invited to come to Denmark
to work in the new institute. Fueled with the exciting discoveries
of radioactivity, quantum theory, and relativity, in its first 25 or 30
years the 20th century witnessed an enormous outpouring of ideas
and discoveries unparalleled in the history of physics. A dynamic
cluster of men and womenambitious, brilliant, keenly prepared,
and talentedgathered in the universities of Europe, Britain, and,
to a lesser degree, Canada and the United States to ride the crest
of a great wave of exploration into the inner regions of the atom.
Niels Bohrs institute rapidly became a point of reference for all
these young physicists, led by the man who came to be known as
the Gentle Dane.
58 Niels Bohr
D uring the 1920s and 1930s, the Institute for Theoretical Physics
in Copenhagen, headed by Bohr, commanded an influence
over the world of scientific thought equaled only by Aristotles
Lyceum in Athens. Theoretical physicists went there from all over
the world, during a time often called the heroic age of atomic phys-
ics. These were the same yearsespecially 1925 to 1927that in
Gttingen are known as the years of Knabenphysik, boyhood phys-
ics. Breakthrough after breakthrough was made by very young
scientists: Werner Heisenberg, at 23; Wolfgang Pauli, at 25; Paul
Dirac, at 22. At 37, Erwin Schrdinger, by contrast, seemed out of
place. All of these found their way to Niels Bohrs institute and felt
the influence of Bohr the mentor, himself only in his early 40s. One
by one, each carved out a place for himself in the quantum physics
59
0 NielsBohr
hall of fame. The year 1925, in particular, was a great year in physics,
especially quantum physics.
an unlikely friendship:
wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung
Of all the young and brilliant men who orbited Niels Bohr, Wolfgang
Pauli was one of the more enigmatic and colorful. Quite aware of his
own brilliance, he published a 200-page article on relativity for The
Encyclopedia of Mathematical Sciences when he was only 21 years
old. Einstein himself was greatly impressed, writing in 1922:
Who ever studies this mature and grandly composed work
would not believe that the author is a man of twenty-one. One
does not know what to admire most: the psychological un-
derstanding of the evolution of ideas, the accuracy of math-
ematical deduction, the deep physical insight, the capacity
for lucid systematic presentation, the knowledge of literature,
the factual completeness, or the infallibility of criticism.
It was heady praise on which to start a career.
Demanding much of himself, Pauli also demanded much from his
scientic colleagues. His scathing criticismsI dont mind you think-
ing slowly, but I mind your publishing much faster than you thinkare
still quoted today. Many of his letters were signed The scourge of
God, and he could often be seen, as he listened to papers being pre-
sented by his colleagues, leaning forward in his chair, his oversized
head bobbing up and down as he analyzed each line of reasoning.
Bohrandeinstein:BattlebetweenFriends
same way, that is, occupy the same energy state. He announced this
Exclusion Principle in 1925.
The Exclusion Principle explained why electrons in an atom do
not all drop down to the orbit nearest the nucleuswhich might
normally be expected, since an electron traveling along the small-
est, closest ring requires the least amount of energy to complete an
orbit. According to Paulis principle, once an electron is in an orbit, it
excludes any other electron from occupying the same orbit. Over the
years Paulis Exclusion Principle has proved to hold true for nuclear
particles that no one had even dreamed of, and it has been a key con-
cept in the development of quantum mechanics. Pauli received the
Nobel Prize in physics (somewhat belatedly) for this work in 1945.
Wave-Particle Duality
In Paris, meanwhile, Louis de Broglie proposed an idea, known as
the wave-particle duality, that ended up bothering Albert Einstein
a great deal. De Broglie maintained that if atomic particles were
also thought of as waves,
not just particles, the conse-
quences theoretically were
very nice, even though the
idea is mind-boggling.
According to Planck and
Einstein, light, which had
most recently been regarded
as a wave, should be regarded
as a particle. Now de Broglie
was saying that particles
photons, electrons, even
atomssometimes behave
like waves. Outlandish as this
sounds, experimental tests
bear out de Broglies theory.
The idea immediate-
ly caught on among many
Erwin Schrdinger is best known today for a
paradox he called Schrdingers Cat. (Francis
physicists. In 1926, Erwin
Simon, courtesy AIP Emilio Segr Visual Archives) Schrdinger came up with
Bohr and Einstein: Battle between Friends 63
Heisenberg: Uncertainty
and Quantum Theory
The issues heated up in March 1927, when Werner Heisenberg pro-
duced another amazing physical theory: the Uncertainty Principle.
According to that principle, the exact position and precise velocity
of an electron could not be determined at the same time. In other
words, no one can tell for certain where an electron will go when it
is hitall that can be said is where it probably will go. Only statistical
predictions can be made.
This idea capped off the great scientific revolution we call quan-
tum theory. (Although much remained to be wrapped up and quan-
tum field theory is still evolving today. Some scientists contend that
the theory will not be complete until it is fully combined with gravi-
tation, and many have attempted to formulate a unified field theory
that would accomplish this goal.) The work of Born, Schrdinger
and Heisenberg formed the basis for quantum mechanics, which has
been used to interpret chemistry and subatomic physics with great
success. Yet Einstein never accepted the Uncertainty Principle, and
he debated long and ardently with Bohr about it.
In September 1927 Bohr attended a meeting in Colma, Italy.
(Einstein had been invited, but he did not attend.) There, on
Bohr and Einstein: Battle between Friends 65
September 16, Bohr outlined for the first time the principle he
called complementarity:
The very nature of the quantum theory ... forces us to regard
the space-time coordination and the claim of causality, the
union of which characterizes the classical theories, as comple-
mentary but exclusive features of the description, symbolizing
the idealization of observation and definition, respectively.
Bohr maintained that a phenomenon can be looked upon in
two mutually exclusive ways, and yet both outlooks can remain
valid in their own terms. For
example, you may know the
momentum or the position
of an electron, but not both.
As his student Frisch put it,
It is a bit as if reality was
painted on both sides of a
canvas so that you could only
see one aspect of it clearly at
any time. Complementarity
would become the corner-
stone of Bohrs thinking
about quantum and classical
physics, his way of reconcil-
ing two equally plausible but
mutually exclusive ideas.
Brilliant, vital, and excit-
ing ideas, the emerging con-
cepts of quantum physics
were also unsettling. Even
Bohr, having put quantum to
its first use in the physics of
matter, recognized the theo-
rys enormous mysteries. Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr talked fervently
It makes me quite giddy whenever they could find the time, exploring
the complexities of atomic physics together,
to think about these prob- such as this opportunity, probably at the
lems, a visitor once com- Solvay Conference of 1930. (Paul Ehrenfast,
courtesy AIP Emilio Segr Visual Archives,
plained to Bohr. But, but, Ehrenfast Collection)
NielsBohr
One of Bohr and Einsteins most puzzling thought experiments was the
clock-in-a-box.
D uring the early 1930s, Bohr guided the physicists of his insti-
tute into the realm of theoretical nuclear physics. The new
era began in August 1928, when George Gamow, a talented young
physicist from Odessa, stopped at Copenhagen on his way back
to the Soviet Union after his postdoctoral work in Gttingen. As
he later told the story, he detoured to Copenhagen to meet Bohr,
but had only $10 in his pocket, lodging for only one night, and no
food. He urgently told Bohrs secretary that he had to see Bohr that
dayhe could not afford to stay longer. So Bohr met with Gamow
and discussed with him the paper on gamma rays that Gamow had
been working on in Germany. Then Bohr said, My secretary told
me you cannot stay more than one day because you have no money.
Now if I organize for you a fellowship... would you stay for a year?
71
72 Niels Bohr
In 1930, Bohr and his institute held a conference that was well attended, with many of
the participants numbering among the most productive scientists in the world. Seated in
the front row, left to right: Oskar Klein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli,
George Gamow, Lev Landau, and Hendrik Kramers. (Niels Bohr Archive, Copenhagen)
The Spirit of Copenhagen 73
this was the first evidence that ordinary (nonradioactive) atoms were
not indestructible. Over the next five years, with his colleague James
Chadwick, Rutherford tried similar experiments skimming off pro-
tons from the nuclei of 10 different elements with alpha bullets.
From these experiments they began to realize that the nucleus was
not just a tiny positively charged entity; they were probing it, and if it
could be probed, and chunks could be broken off in this way, it must
have an internal structureit must be composed of particles. The
question was, what particles?
Perhaps, Rutherford hypothesized, there was a third, neutral,
atomic particle not yet discovered. It was a reasonable idea, since
protons alone could not account for the atomic weight of any atom
except hydrogen. Lithium, for example, has only three protons, and
yet its atomic weight is seven. The negative charge of electrons bal-
anced the protons positive charge. Yet the mass of electrons, the
only other known particle, was negligible. Where did all the rest of
the weight come from?
Irne and Frdric Joliot-Curie, in the tradition of Irnes par-
ents, Marie and Pierre Curie, also were actively exploring atomic
structure, in Paris. In their experiments they had been bombarding
beryllium with alpha particles, and they were getting a strange par-
ticle they thought was a type of penetrating radiation, like a gamma
ray. Bohr wrote to Rutherford, however, that he didnt think they
were right. James Chadwick, who was working with Rutherford, tried
a similar series of experiments. He spent day and night at the lab for
three weeks straight, finally coming up with proof of the existence of
Rutherfords neutral particle.
Rutherford shot the news off to Bohr, who was delighted. In
Copenhagen, he and his colleagues confirmed the results. The neu-
tron was discovered, successfully accounting for all the excess weight
on the periodic table.
Bohr took mentoring seriously, challenging his students and colleagues with a soft
voice and big questions. In this photo, Bohr (left) meets with James Franck (center)
and Hans Marius Hansen. (AIP Emilio Segr Visual Archives, Margrethe Bohr Collection)
After fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany, Albert Einstein joined Princeton Universitys
Institute for Advanced Study, with which he remained affiliated for the rest of his life.
Bohr also spent some time there, and they were able to meet and continue their ongo-
ing discussions about their thought experiments.
(Alan Richards, courtesy of the Archives, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J.)
the recognition that most of its mass existed at its center; from the
wave-particle duality to the uncertainty principle to complementarity,
the surprises never seemed to cease. Strangely, the stage, it seemed,
had been set for the most astoundingfateful, its been saidevent
of all, which would take place in 1938, on the eve of World War II: the
splitting of uranium atoms, which emitted further particles, which in
turn could split other atoms, with the possibility of a chain reaction
and the release of enormous amounts of energy.
To those who were immersed in the field of physics, the news
of this unheard-of result from a laboratory near Berlin simultane-
ously sent two shivers down the spine: one, at the recognition of an
extraordinary scientific factthat the uranium atom could be split in
this way; and a second, at the comprehension of its political implica-
tions, just as Europe was entering a war with Germany.
6 Open Door to
the Nuclear Age
(19381945)
O f all those in the world of physics who were watching from out-
side Germany, Bohr was one of the first to act in response to the
deepening Nazi crisis. Physicists in Germany began receiving notes
from him, completely unsolicited, suggesting that they might want
to come to Copenhagen to visit and discuss their plans. The subtext
clearly was: I will offer you a haven and help you plan a future outside
Germany. The flow of scientists from Germany to Denmark soon
became steady, and, through his influence, Bohr found new positions
for them in the United States, England, and Sweden.
Among those Bohr helped flee from Germany was Lise Meitner,
a physicist who had been working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in
Berlin with the respected German chemist Otto Hahn. Meitner was
also the aunt of Otto Frisch, who had escaped German rule much
earlier and had been working at Bohrs institute for several years. She
83
84 Niels Bohr
the tone was excited. Meitner reached into her pockets and began
pulling out scraps of paper to scribble out a few quick calculations.
Hahn and his assistant, Fritz Strassmann, had been trying to
solve a mystery by bombarding small quantities of uranium with
neutrons. This process typically produced only a few thousand
atoms of daughter substances, new substances having a different
atomic makeup from the parent, which in this case was uranium.
Then the challenge was to identify the new substances and explain
why they were produced.
But Hahn wrote Meitner because he could not understand his
results. The fact is, he wrote, theres something so strange about
the radium isotopes [produced by the bombardment] that for the
time being we are mentioning it only to you.... Our radium isotopes
act like barium.
Hahn and Strassmann expected to split little pieces off the
nucleus, somewhat as Rutherford had, to produce substances that
were nearby on the periodic table, such as radium, with an atomic
number of 88, compared with uraniums 92. Barium, however, has an
atomic number of 56. As Frisch and Meitner walked, they realized
that Hahn and Strassmann had done the undoable. They had split
the heavy uranium atom asunder.
Both Meitner and Frisch also realized the implications of this
capability in the hands of German Nazis. The relatively enormous
quantity of energy released by splitting uranium atoms could have
great destructive power. The conclusions they had reached, making
their calculations as they sat in the snow, were also very exciting
news for the scientific community. This was news that must reach
the right people.
Frisch hurried back to Denmark. Arriving just before Bohrs
departure by steamer for a meeting in the United States, he set the
evidence before his mentor.
Oh what idiots we all have been! Oh but this is wonderful!
This is just as it must be! exclaimed Bohr, striking his hand to his
head. Excited, he encouraged his protg to publish a paper with
Meitner on their interpretation of the Hahn-Strassmann results
as soon as possible. Then he embarked for the United States. En
route, he mentioned the exciting news to a colleague, and at a meet-
ing the news leaked outbefore Meitner and Frischs paper was
NielsBohr
Werner Heisenberg and Bohr were friends and colleagues before World
War II, as shown in this picture, but the ties grew uncomfortable when
Heisenberg did not leave Germany. Many feared he was working on
the atomic bomb. (Paul Ehrenfast, Jr., courtesy AIP Emilio Segr Visual
Archives, Weisskopf Collection)
Escape
In 1940 the German threat moved closer for Bohr, when the German
armies invaded his homeland. He and Margrethe decided to stay,
however, and in the following three years, he became prominent
in efforts to get those in danger out of Denmark, helping them find
boats to cross the sea to safety.
Another concern of Bohrs, of course, was that assets and equip-
ment should be prevented from falling into German hands, if pos-
sible. Bohr devised a means to protect two Nobel medalsMax
Plancks and Max Lauesthat had been given to him for safekeep-
ing. To prevent the Nazis from recognizing the value of the medals,
he dissolved them in acid and hid the acid-filled vials. After the war
he precipitated the gold out of the acid and recast the medals in their
original form for return to their owners. (Bohr had donated his own
medal to aid the Finnish war effort.)
Bohr stayed in Denmark until 1943, when it became clear that
the Germans intended to imprison him. He and his family narrowly
escaped in a fishing boat, and once he reached safety in Sweden he
continued to help many others escape. There the decision was made
to fly him with his son Aage, then 21, to London, where they could
help with the British war effort. Bundled into the cramped bomb bay
of an unarmed Mosquito British bomber, Bohr became preoccupied
during the flight and pushed off his helmet. Bohr didnt hear the pilots
openDoortotheNuclearAge
warning that they would be flying to high altitude, and by the time the
plane arrived in London, he was near death from lack of oxygen.
While visiting Los Alamos, Bohr skied the snowy slopes, all the while thinking and
talking about atomic physics.
(John P. Miller, courtesy AIP Emilio Segr Visual Archives, Segr Collection)
Open Door to the Nuclear Age 93
94
The Final Years 95
Considered one of the greatest theoretical physicists since Sir Isaac Newton, Bohr was an
inspired theorist, a charismatic teacher and leader, and a compassionate humanitarian.
(Max Planck Institute fur Physik, courtesy AIP Emilio Segr Visual Archives)
98 Niels Bohr
once again for a short stay at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, where he enlisted the help of his former student and future
biographer, Abraham Pais. Many discussions ensued. Bohr returned
to Copenhagen in May, where he and Harald hammered out the text
of the letter in secret. They sent the letter to Bohrs son Aage, who
at the time was at Columbia University in New York. At 10:00 a.m.
on June 9, a moment timed to coincide with a press conference Bohr
called in Copenhagen, Aage Bohr delivered the letter to the office of
the secretary general of the United Nations, Trygve Lie.
The following excerpt contains the major points of the letter:
The situation calls for the most unprejudiced attitude towards
all questions of international relations. Indeed, proper appre-
ciation of the duties and responsibilities implied in world
citizenship is in our time more necessary than ever before. On
the one hand, the progress of science and technology has tied
the fate of all nations inseparably together, on the other hand,
it is on a most different cultural background that vigorous
endeavours for national self-assertion and social development
are being made in the various parts of our globe. An open
world where each nation can assert itself solely by the extent to
which it can contribute to the common culture and is able to
help others with experience and resources must be the goal to
be put above everything else... The arguments presented sug-
gest that every initiative from any side towards the removal of
obstacles for free mutual information and intercourse would
be of the greatest importance in breaking the present deadlock
and encouraging others to take steps in the same direction.
Bohr opened his press conference in Copenhagen and read the
contents of his letter before the assembled members of the press.
Having said everything he meant to say in the text of some 5,500
words, he refused, for the most part, to accept questions and con-
cluded his news conference.
The reaction was disappointing. Secretary General Lie acknowl-
edged receiving the letter, assuring Bohr that he would give it most
careful consideration, but the international body never made plans
to discuss or debate its premises. Few outside the Scandinavian
countries paid any attention to the news conference. Not until Bohr
The Final Years 99
mind has explored the mysteries of the inner structure of atoms, and
whose spirit has reached into the very heart of man.
Between 1945 and 1961 Bohr delivered more than 20 lectures
all over the world. In the process, he also received more than 30
honorary doctorates from such prestigious institutions as Princeton
and Columbia universities. During the 1950s Bohrs travels were
extensive, including visits to Iceland in 1951, to Israel in 1953, to
Yugoslavia in 1956, to Greenland in 1957, and again to Yugoslavia
and Israel in 1958.
107
108 Niels Bohr
113
114 Niels Bohr
Here is Bohr, working on an equation with his son, Aage, also a Nobel laureate in physics.
(AIP Emilio Segr Visual Archives, Margrethe Bohr Collection)
117
118 Niels Bohr
1939 Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch realize that the atom
can be split.
Bohr and John Wheeler realize that atomic fission
will release great energy.
Bohr helps German-Jewish scientists flee from
Germany.
Einstein warns President Roosevelt that Germany
may be developing atomic power.
World War II begins in September when Germany
invades Poland.
Fermi, now in America, and Frdric and Irne
Joliot-Curie in Paris posit that a nuclear chain
reaction is possible.
alpha particle (alpha rays) one of three types of radiation (the others
are beta particles and gamma particles) discovered in early studies of
radioactivity around 1900. Rutherford showed that alpha particles are
helium nuclei, which are made up of two protons and two neutrons
tightly bound together
atom the smallest chemical unit of an element, consisting of a dense,
positively charged nucleus surrounded by negatively charged elec-
trons. The Greek thinker Leucippus and his student Democritus
originally conceived of the idea of the atom in the 5th century b.c. as
the smallest particle into which matter could be divided. (The word
atom comes from the Greek word atomos, which means indivis-
ible.) But in the 1890s and early 20th century, scientists discovered
that the atom is made up of even smaller particles, most of which are
very strongly bound together
atomic mass (also known as atomic weight) the relative average
mass in atomic mass units (or amu, equal to 1/12 the weight of the
isotope carbon-12) of the masses of all the isotopes found in a natural
sample of an element
atomic number the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom
atomic spectrum the characteristic pattern produced by light emitted
by any element when it is heated
beta particle a high-speed electron (or its positive cousin, the posi-
tron) emitted during radioactive decay
complementarity the existence of different aspects of the description
of a physical system, seemingly incompatible but both needed for a
complete description of the system. In particular, the wave-particle
duality (the need to describe some systems as composed of both waves
and particles)
cyclotron a device used to accelerate atomic particles around and
around in a circle until they reach immense energies
electron a very light, negatively charged subatomic particle that orbits
the nucleus of an atom
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122 Niels Bohr
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126 Niels Bohr
Rozental, S. (editor). Niels Bohr: His Life and Work as Seen by His
Friends and Colleagues. New York: John Wiley, 1967.
Highly personal reminiscences by those who knew him. Easy to
read and often charming.
Segr, Gino. Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics.
New York: Viking, 2007.
A compelling look at the brilliantly individual men and women
who through arguments, challenges, grueling all-night discus-
sions, and years of eccentric teamwork put together the pieces of
quantum mechanics.
Internet Resources
Bohr, Niels. Banquet Speech. Available online. URL: http://nobelprize.
org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1922/bohr-speech.html. Accessed
May 14, 2007.
The speech was given by Niels Bohr at the Nobel banquet in
Stockholm on December 10, 1922.
. The Constitution of Atoms and Molecules. Published origi-
nally in Philosophical Magazine 1913. Available online. URL: http://
dbhs.wvusd.k12.ca.us/webdocs/Chem-History/Bohr/Bohr-1913a.html.
Accessed May 14, 2007.
This challenging paper requires a strong knowledge of math but
is also worth a look for Bohrs style of writing and thinking.
132 Niels Bohr
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136 Niels Bohr