Niels Bohr

Niels Bohr

Niels Henrik David Bohr (7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory. Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus. He predicted the existence of a new zirconium-like element, which was named hafnium. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his contributions to quantum theory and atomic structure.

About Niels Bohr in brief

Summary Niels BohrNiels Henrik David Bohr (7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory. Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus. He predicted the existence of a new zirconium-like element, which was named hafnium, after the Latin name for Copenhagen, where it was discovered. During the 1930s Bohr helped refugees from Nazism. After the war, Bohr called for international cooperation on nuclear energy. He was involved with the establishment of CERN and the Research Establishment Risø of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission and became the first chairman of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1957. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his contributions to quantum theory and atomic structure. He also was a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research. The element bohrium was named after him. He died of a heart attack in 1962 at the age of 75. He is buried in Copenhagen, Denmark, with his wife and three children. He had three brothers: Harald, Jenny, and a younger brother, Harald. The younger Bohr became a mathematician and footballer who played for the Danish national team at the 1908 Summer Olympics in London. The older Bohr was a passionate footballer as well, and the two brothers played several matches for the Copenhagen-based Akademisk Boldklub, with Niels as goalkeeper.

In 1903 he enrolled as an undergraduate at Copenhagen University. His major was physics, which he studied under Professor Christian Christiansen, the university’s only professor of physics at that time. In 1905 a gold medal competition was sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters to investigate a method for measuring the surface tension of liquids that had been proposed by Lord Rayleigh in 1879. He went beyond the original task, incorporating improvements into both Rayleigh’s theory and his method, by taking into account the viscosity of the water, and by working with finite amplitudes instead of just infinitesimal ones. He later submitted an improved version of the paper to the Royal Society in London for publication in the Transactions of the Philosophical Society. In 1909 he earned his master’s degree, on the electron theory of metals. He then went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy degree. He concluded that electrons behave like a gas, but was still unable to account for phenomena like the Lorentz effect and concluded that Bohr’s model still did not account for the effect. In 1913 he wrote a much-larger thesis on the subject, settling on a postulated by Dr Hendrik Lorez and Dr Paul Hall, which elaborated on a model by Paul Hall and elaborated by Dr. Paul Hall on the Lorez effect. He mentored and collaborated with physicists including Hans Kramers, Oskar Klein, George de Hevesy, and Werner Heisenberg. In September 1943 he fled to Sweden.