Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen in 1885 to an academic family and trained as a physicist under Ernest Rutherford in Manchester. His 1913 model of the hydrogen atom — with electrons restricted to discrete orbital energies — was the first physical theory to make quantum mechanics tangible. He won the Nobel Prize in 1922 and founded the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, which under his direction became the world's centre of quantum thought: Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, Dirac all worked there. His Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, developed with Heisenberg, remains the standard view. Half-Jewish, he fled Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943, joined the , and after the war became a passionate advocate for nuclear arms control, including an open letter to the United Nations in 1950.
All Figures
Physicist · Architect of Quantum Theory
Niels Bohr
1,885 CE – 1,962 CE
The Danish physicist whose 1913 model of the atom — electrons in quantised orbits — gave humanity its first working picture of the quantum world.
Lifetime
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