Niels Bohr blew his own glass and kept goal before remaking the atom
When the King of Denmark met his newest physics professor, he was thrilled to greet a famous footballer. Niels Bohr had indeed kept goal for a Copenhagen club, but his real fame came from a 1913 trilogy of papers that put quantum jumps inside the atom and finally explained hydrogen's colours.
Born in Copenhagen on 7 October 1885, Bohr was the son of a physiology professor and a banker's daughter. His younger brother Harald became a mathematician who played for Denmark at the 1908 London Olympics. As a student, Niels entered a 1905 Royal Danish Academy contest on measuring surface tension through vibrating water jets. His university had no physics laboratory, so he used his father's, blowing his own test tubes with elliptical cross-sections. He refined Lord Rayleigh's method, handed the essay in at the last minute, and took the gold medal.
His 1911 doctorate on electrons in metals was written in Danish, as Copenhagen required, so few outsiders read it. That September a Carlsberg Foundation fellowship took him to England. J. J. Thomson at Cambridge was unimpressed, but Ernest Rutherford invited him to Manchester. Back home, Bohr married in 1912 and in 1913 published three papers in Philosophical Magazine that grafted Rutherford's nucleus onto Max Planck's quantum ideas.
In his model electrons circle the nucleus only in fixed 'stationary states', and light is released when an electron drops from a higher orbit to a lower one. Johann Balmer had described hydrogen's visible spectral lines with a formula in 1885, yet for thirty years no one knew why it held; Bohr derived it. When Alfred Fowler pointed to stray lines, Bohr traced them to helium stripped down to a single electron. Older figures such as Lorentz resisted, while Einstein, Fermi and Born welcomed the theory. It later won him the 1922 Nobel Prize.
A campaign begun in 1917 produced his Institute of Theoretical Physics, which opened on 3 March 1921 with his family living upstairs, and drew visitors such as Hans Kramers and Oskar Klein. Bohr predicted the element hafnium, named for Copenhagen's Latin name; bohrium honours him. Warned in September 1943 of imminent German arrest, he fled to Sweden and then Britain, joining its atomic bomb effort. After the war he pushed for international cooperation and helped found CERN. He died in 1962.
Source: Niels Bohr
