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The 10 best physicists – no. 2 – Niels Bohr

At number 2 in The Guardian’s list of the ten best physicists is Niels Bohr.

Bohr is best known for his work on the allowed orbits an electron in an atom can have. This is the so-called “Bohr model”, and in 1922 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this suggestion that electrons can only exist in certain allowed orbits, which naturally explained the line spectra of the elements.

Bohr’s brief biography

Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen in 1885, the second of three children. His father, Christian Bohr, was a professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen. His mother, Ellen Adler, came from a wealthy Danish Jewish family. At 18, Bohr enrolled at Copenhagen University where he studied physics. In 1905, whilst still an undergraduate, Bohr won the first prize in a competition sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy of Arts and Sciences. In May 1911 he obtained his PhD for a thesis on the electron theory of metals.

In the same year, Bohr took up a post-doctoral research position at The University of Manchester, working in Ernest Rutherford’s research team. He arrived in Manchester just as Rutherford was proposing the theory that atoms contained small, positively charged nuclei; where nearly all the atom’s mass was concentrated. However, by 1912 Bohr had returned to his native Denmark where he got a job teaching medical students. In 1913 he published his first paper suggesting what is now known as the “Bohr model” of the atom.

He returned to Manchester in 1914, and spent two more years working with Rutherford, as a Reader in the Physics Department. Then, in 1916 a Professorship in Theoretical Physics was created for him at the University of Copenhagen. In 1918 Bohr started trying to establish an institute of theoretical physics in Copenhagen, the institute opened in 1921 and became known as the Niels Bohr Institute. Apart from fleeing from Nazi occupied Denmark in 1943, Bohr spent the rest of his career as the Director of this institute he had established, and died in 1962 at the age of 77.

Bohr’s contributions to Physics

When Rutherford proposed his model of the atom with a positively charged nucleus and the electrons in orbit about it, a problem arose. Classical physics predicted that an electron in orbit, because it is constantly accelerating through changing its direction, should be constantly radiating. As a consequence, it should lose its energy and spiral in towards the nucleus. Calculations showed that this should happen in millionths of a second, meaning all atoms would be unstable.

In 1913, Bohr suggested that electrons could only exist in certain allowed orbits. He suggested that these orbits were “quantised”, and that the angular momentum of electron orbits had to be equal to $L=n\hbar$ where $n$ is an integer (1,2,3 etc.) and $\hbar \text{ is } h/2\pi$ where $h$ is Planck’s constant.

Bohr then suggested that electrons could be excited from one orbit to another, either by gaining some (or all) of the energy of an incoming electron, or by absorbing all of the energy of an incoming photon. When electrons were excited to a higher energy level, they would quickly jump back down to the lowest available orbit, and in so doing would emit light (photons) of particular wavelengths.

This “Bohr model” was able to naturally explain the observed spectra of hydrogen (which only has one electron and one proton), and of singly-ionised helium, which again only has one electron. Its success led to Bohr being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1922, the citation reading “for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them”.

Bohr played a central role in the probabilistic interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. The so-called “Copenhagen interpretation”, of which he was the main champion, was that physics was not able, under the laws of quantum mechanics, to give us any more than the probabilities of the outcomes of experiments. This was in stark contrast to e.g. Einstein, who believed that that nature was inherently deterministic not probabilistic.

Bohr was instrumental in the establishment of CERN, the European Centre for Particle Physics Research. He was very much one of the elder-statesmen of the Physics community, and a period at his Institute in Copenhagen became almost essential in the career of any theoretical physicist.

Do you think Niels Bohr deserves to be in this list of the ten best physicists?

You can read more about Niels Bohr and the other physicists in this “10 best” list in our book 10 Physicists Who Transformed Our Understanding of the UniverseClick here for more details and to read some reviews.

Ten Physicists Who Transformed Our Understanding of Reality is available now. Follow this link to order

5 Responses

1. Reblogged this on Ruba Aburub and commented:
those were the best..but the best is yet to come 😉

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3. […] my blog on Niels Bohr, number 2 in The Guardian’s list of the 10 best physicists, I mentioned the Bohr model of the […]