James Baquet

    Danish physicist Niels Bohr (1885-1962) was a pioneer in describing the structure of the atom, as well as in establishing quantum theory. In 1922, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work. Though the so-called “Bohr model” of the atom that he proposed in 1913 was superseded in the course of time, it was a major step forward and is sometimes still taught to beginning students today.

    Bohr’s understanding of the atom, and of its quantum qualities, was expanded on by the German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld. This “Bohr-Sommerfeld quantization” was the crucial step between classical mechanics and the modern understanding of quantum mechanics.

    Aside from his work in physics, Bohr was a philosopher and humanitarian who helped people fleeing from Nazi Germany. He himself was forced to leave, settling for a time in England.

    The British “lent” him to America’s Manhattan Project, the project that developed the atomic bomb. In the process, he met both British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and American President Franklin Roosevelt. Both of these men were concerned that Bohr’s humanitarian philosophy could cause him to become a risk to the project’s secrecy.

    After the war, he returned to Denmark where he continued to campaign for the control of nuclear arms and international cooperation in the area of peaceful applications of nuclear energy. He was later part of the creation of CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), an international institute for scientific study, located in Geneva, Switzerland. The Internet was a result of one of the many projects of this important organization.

    Among the many honors given to Bohr for his life’s work, perhaps one of the rarest is that a chemical element, bohrium, has been named after him. Only around 15 elements are named after people, including curium (for Pierre and Marie Curie), einsteinium (for Albert Einstein), and nobelium (for Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize).

    Vocabulary

    Which word above means:

    1. running away

    2. the laws describing the behavior of very small things, like atoms and their parts

    3. dedicated to helping other people

    4. not being told of publicly

    5. the laws describing the behavior of larger things, like falling objects

    6. person who began something, like a religion or other organization

    7. one of the earliest people to do something

    8. replaced