Niels bohr who is he

He later donated his gold Nobel medal to the Finnish war effort. In Bohr visited the United States with the news from Lise Meitner who had escaped German-occupied Austria that German scientists were working on splitting the atom. This spurred the United States to launch the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. Shortly after Bohr's return home, the German army occupied Denmark. Three years later Bohr's family fled to Sweden in a fishing boat.

Then Bohr and his son Aage left Sweden traveling in the empty bomb rack of a British military plane. They ultimately went to the United States, where both joined the government's team of physicists working on atomic bomb at Los Alamos. Bohr had qualms about the consequences of the bomb.

He angered Winston Churchill by wanting to share information with the Soviet Union and supporting postwar arms control. His subsequent work became increasingly theoretical. It was while conducting research for his doctoral thesis on the electron theory of metals that Bohr first came across Max Planck's early quantum theory, which described energy as tiny particles, or quanta.

In , Bohr was working for the Nobel laureate J. Thompson in England when he was introduced to Ernest Rutherford, whose discovery of the nucleus and development of an atomic model had earned him a Nobel Prize in chemistry in Under Rutherford's tutelage, Bohr began studying the properties of atoms. Bohr held a lectureship in physics at Copenhagen University from to and went on to hold a similar position at Victoria University in Manchester from to He went back to Copenhagen University in to become a professor of theoretical physics.

In , he was appointed the head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics. Combining Rutherford's description of the nucleus and Planck's theory about quanta, Bohr explained what happens inside an atom and developed a picture of atomic structure. With it he won the Gold Medal for from the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences for his analysis of vibrations of water jets as a means of determining surface tension.

He received his Master's degree from the University of Copenhagen in and his doctorate in May for a thesis entitled Studies on the electron theory of metals. It was a thesis based on classical physics and as such necessarily failed to explain certain effects. Bohr wrote in this work:- It does not seem possible at the present stage of the development of the electron theory to explain the magnetic properties of bodies from this theory.

Bohr dedicated his thesis to the memory of his father who had died from a heart attack a few months earlier in February By this time Bohr was engaged to Margrethe Norlund. The pair married on 1 August and Richard Courant , speaking after Bohr's death, had this to say of their marriage:- Some people have speculated about the lucky circumstances which combined to make Niels so successful.

I think the ingredients of his life were by no means matters of chance but deeply ingrained in the structure of his personality It was not luck, rather deep insight, which led him to find in young years his wife, who, as we all know, had such a decisive role in making his whole scientific and personal activity possible and harmonious.

He had intended to spend his entire study period in Cambridge but he did not get on well with Thomson so, after a meeting with Ernest Rutherford in Cambridge in December , Bohr moved to the Victoria University, Manchester now the University of Manchester in March The timing was very fortuitous since shortly before Bohr and Rutherford met, Rutherford had published a major work showing that the bulk of the mass of an atom resided in the nucleus.

In Manchester Bohr worked with Rutherford's group on the structure of the atom. Rutherford became Bohr's role model both for his personal and scientific qualities. Using quantum ideas due to Planck and Einstein , Bohr conjectured that an atom could exist only in a discrete set of stable energy states. Remarkable evidence exists today of Bohr's scientific progress since he corresponded frequently with his brother Harald. He wrote to Harald on 12 June :- You can imagine it is fine to be here, where there are so many people to talk with In the last years he has worked out a theory of the structure of atoms, which seems to be quite a bit more firmly founded than anything which has existed up to now.

A week after writing this letter, on 19 June, Bohr was reporting progress to Harald :- Perhaps I have found out a little about the structure of atoms. Don't talk about it to anyone, for otherwise I couldn't write to you about it so soon. You understand that I may yet be wrong; for it hasn't been worked out fully yet but I don't think its wrong. Believe me, I am eager to finish it in a hurry, and to do so I have taken a couple of days off from the laboratory this is also a secret.

By the 13 July he wrote:- Things are going rather well, for I believe I have found out a few things; but, to be sure, I have not been so quick to work them out as I was stupid to think. I hope to have a little paper ready and to show it to Rutherford before I leave, and I therefore am so busy, so busy.

Although Rutherford and Bohr had completely different personalities, they shared an enormous enthusiasm for physics and they also liked each other personally. However the relationship was never quite that of close friends since Bohr always saw Rutherford as his teacher. They corresponded from the time they met in until , the year of Rutherford's death. On 24 July , with his paper still unfinished, Bohr left Rutherford's group in Manchester and returned to Copenhagen to continue to develop his new theory of the atom, completing the work in The same year he published three papers of fundamental importance on the theory of atomic structure.

The first paper was on the hydrogen atom, the next two on the structure of atoms heavier than hydrogen. In these papers Bohr [ 5 ] The three famous papers His work, although not immediately accepted by everyone, intrigued his contemporaries and made them aware of the need for a new way of describing events at atomic level.

The Bohr atom, although it has been superseded scientifically, persists even today in the minds of many people as a vivid image of what atoms look like and a symbol of physics. In July Bohr was appointed as a docent in Copenhagen. However it was not a situation which pleased him since he could not pursue the style of mathematical physics which he was developing. On 10 March he wrote to the Department of Educational Affairs:- The undersigned takes the liberty of petitioning the department to bring about the founding of a professorship in theoretical physics at the university and in addition to possibly entrust me with that position.

It was a bold move but Bohr's already high reputation meant that he would be taken seriously. The Faculty of the University recommended him for a chair of theoretical physics but the Department of Educational Affairs decided to delay confirming the post.

Of course in times were uncertain and Bohr realised that no quick decision was likely. In particular, he advocated a development towards full openness between nations. Paul , Minnesota, Roosevelt Chicago, Ill. They had six sons, of whom they lost two; the other four have made distinguished careers in various professions — Hans Henrik M. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures.

To cite this document, always state the source as shown above. Niels Bohr died in Copenhagen on November 18,