November 18, 1962 - Death of Niels Bohr, contributed to the understanding of the atom and quantum mechanics

After receiving his doctorate in physics from the University of Copenhagen in 1911, he sought to further his studies at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge with Joseph J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1906. This was a subject of great interest to Bohr, as it was the subject of his doctoral thesis, which he hoped would be translated into English. However, Thomson was not very enthusiastic about Bohr's work, so he decided to go to Manchester and complete his studies with Ernest Rutherford, another Nobel Prize winner and expert in radioactivity and atomic models, as his teacher, with whom he established a long-lasting scientific and friendly relationship.

Rutherford had worked out a theory of the atom which was entirely valid on a speculative level, but which could not be sustained within the laws of classical physics. Bohr, in a display of boldness that was unpredictable in his shy and retiring character, dared to circumvent these problems that were hindering Rutherford's progress with a solution as simple as it was risky: he simply stated that the movements inside the atom were governed by laws that were alien to those of traditional physics.

In 1913, Niels Bohr achieved worldwide fame in the field of physics by publishing a series of essays in which he revealed his particular model of the structure of the atom. It was a modification of Rutherford's atomic model in which the atom is like a ‘microscopic solar system’ in which the electrons orbit the nucleus. Bohr assumed that the electrons moved in circular orbits around the nucleus.

In 1922, the year in which Bohr definitively established himself as a scientist of universal renown by winning the Nobel Prize ‘for his research into the structure of atoms and the radiation emanating from them’.

Immersed in his research on the atom and quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr enunciated the principle of correspondence in 1923, to which he added the principle of complementarity in 1928. As a result of this last contribution, the so-called ‘Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics’ grew up around him, whose theories were fiercely contested by Albert Einstein. Despite these differences, the father of the theory of relativity recognised in the Danish physicist as ‘one of the greatest scientific researchers of our time’.

In the 1930s, Niels Bohr spent long periods in the United States, where he brought the first news of nuclear fission, discovered in Berlin in 1938 by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann.

In 1957, he received the Atoms for Peace Prize, awarded by the Ford Foundation to encourage scientific research for the betterment of mankind.

If you want to know more about this scientist, click on the following link: Niels Henrik David Bohr