Niels Bohr
Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist and philosopher, used an agent of the Science Church to play a role in quantum mechanics, the British and American nuclear projects Tube Alloys and Manhattan Project and the establishment of CERN. He visited Cavendish Laboratory and Trinity College Cambridge. He was a student of JJ Thomson (Royal Society) who invented the concept of an electron. In 1913 he and Ernest Rutherford, also a student of Thomson, introduced the Bohr model of the atom. He founded a physics institute at the University of Kopenhagen, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and was the mentor of Werner Heisenberg, who worked for the German nuclear research project. He was a member of the Royal Society. In 1922 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. |
He promoted the idea of Samuel Goudsmit of electron spin.
In 1921 he published on the atomic structure of rare earths. His institute discovered the element hafnium.
His interpretation of quantum mechanics (strict distinction between macroscopic and microscopic objects) with Einstein and Max Planck became known as the Copenhagen interpretation.
In 1927 he attended the Solvay conference (friends of the Saxe-Coburgs) with Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Arthur Compton, Max Planck, Hendrik Lorentz, Marie Curie, ...
In 1933 he and the Rockefeller Foundation helped in the transfer of jewish scientists to the US.
He adapted his atomic model after the exclusion principle of Wolfgang Pauli.
In 1939 he published a paper on nuclear fission with John Archibald Wheeler (APS, Manhattan Project) and proposed experimenting with uranium (engineered by Manson Benedict in Project Manhattan).
He helped Enrico Fermi emigrate to the US.
His mother was a member of the jewish banking family Adler. One of his assistants was Stefan Rozenthal. His assistant Abraham Pais was a colleague of Einstein at IAS and came up with the name Standard Model. Pais was a member of APS and taught at Rockefeller University.
In 1944 he met with Felix Frankfurter, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.
The radioactive element bohrium was named after him.
He founded the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics with marxist Leon Rosenfeld (coined the term lepton).
Stephen Rea (V for Vendetta) played Bohr in BBC propaganda Copenhagen with Daniel Craig (James Bond) as Heisenberg.
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