Niels Bohr’s Flight From the Nazis Was a Science Drama

War is Boring ^ | December 20, 2018 | Christopher Miskimon

[C19fan]

Danish physicist Niels Bohr was a scientific genius who also displayed a coincidental penchant for espionage and intrigue. He employed these skills, along with a bit of science, to foil the Nazi at several turns.

His small crusade began in 1933 after the Nazis came to power in Germany. Over the next few years several scientists fled Germany with Bohr’s help. Many escapees went on to work on the Manhattan Project, including Edward Teller, James Franck and Otto Frisch. Some of them stayed with Bohr in Denmark, working at the Bohr Institute until moving elsewhere.

[C19fan]

There was some show about the famous meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr in Stockholm in 1943.

[Ciaphas Cain]

Pretty wild stuff. Bohr was also an Olympic-class athlete in football.

[dhs12345]

He one of the scientists who bridged the gap between Classical and Modern Physics. Still Classical but his theories opened the door to Modern Physics. After that, Physics got very strange and very counter intuitive.

[Trump_the_Evil_Left]

Well it was 1941 in Copenhagen, not 1943 in Stockholm, but otherwise you were close. ;^)

It was first a play, then a film/show on BBC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_(2002_film)

[iowamark]

I am often uncertain about Heisenberg.

[Trump_the_Evil_Left]

I am uncertain about quantum physics.

[dennisw]

Early years

Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 7 October 1885, the second of three children of Christian Bohr,[1][2] a professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen, and Ellen Adler Bohr, who came from a wealthy Danish Jewish family prominent in banking and parliamentary circles.

[3] He had an elder sister, Jenny, and a younger brother Harald.[1] Jenny became a teacher,[2] while Harald became a mathematician and Olympic footballer who played for the Danish national team at the 1908 Summer Olympics in London. Bohr was a passionate footballer as well, and the two brothers played several matches for the Copenhagen-based Akademisk Boldklub (Academic Football Club), with Bohr as goalkeeper.[4]

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks C19fan. Sounds like the Nazi search didn't have a large enough, uh, forget it.

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• George Robert Talbott -- Derivation of Bohr Radius and Planck Constant

[SunkenCiv]

/rimshot

[wideminded]

"It is practically impossible to describe Niels Bohr to a person who has never worked with him. Probably his most characteristic property was the slowness of his thinking and comprehension. When, in the late twenties and early thirties, the author of this book was one of the "Bohr boys" working in his Institute in Copenhagen on a Carlsberg (the best beer in the world!) fellowship, he had many a chance to observe it. In the evening, when a handful of Bohr's students were "working" in the Paa Blegdamsvejen Institute, discussing the latest problems of the quantum theory, or playing Ping-pong on the library table with coffee cups placed on it to make the game more difficult, Bohr would appear, complaining that he was very tired, and would like to "do something." To "do something" inevitably meant to go to the movies, and the only movies Bohr liked were those called The Gun Fight at the Lazy Gee Ranch or The Lone Ranger and a Sioux Girl. But it was hard to go with Bohr to the movies. He could not follow the plot, and was constantly asking us, to the great annoyance of the. rest of the audience, questions like this: "Is that the sister of that cowboy who shot the Indian who tried to steal a herd of cattle belonging to her brother-in-law?" The same slowness of reaction was apparent at scientific meetings. Many a time, a visiting young physicist (most physicists visiting Copenhagen were young) would deliver a brilliant talk about his recent calculations on some intricate problem of the quantum theory. Everybody in the audience would understand the argument quite clearly, but Bohr wouldn't. So everybody would start to explain to Bohr the simple point he had missed, and in the resulting turmoil everybody would stop understanding anything. Finally, after a considerable period of time, Bohr would begin to understand, and it would turn out that what he understood about the problem presented by the visitor was quite different from what the visitor meant, and was correct, while the visitor's interpretation was wrong."

- George Gamow

[dhs12345]

Interesting. All I remember from Physics was his model of the Hydrogen atom. It has been a few years so go easy on me. :)

His model was very simplistic like a planetary system with the sun being the nucleus and the planet being the electron. It worked okay for the simple Hydrogen atom but failed to describe the behavior of more complex molecules.

The limitations of his model raised more questions and in attempting answer those questions, Physicists created a new science called Quantum Mechanics. Chemistry also benefited. A merging of Chemistry and Physics.