Niels Bohr (7 October 1885-18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist, philosopher, and promoter of scientific research whose study of the atom led to his participation in the British mission to the Manhattan Project.
Biography[]
Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1885 to a Danish father and a Jewish mother. Bohr studied physics before traveling to England as a fellow in 1911, developing the Bohr model of the atom. His contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory led to him receiving the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, and he founded the future Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen in 1920 an collaborated with physicists such as Werner Heisenberg. During the 1930s, Bohr helped refugees from Nazism, and, in September 1941, Heisenberg visited Bohr in German-occupied Denmark, and Bohr famously refused to talk with Heisenberg about Nazi Germany's nuclear energy project, as Bohr was surprised that Heisenberg believed that Germany could win the war and that atomic weapons could be decisive. On 29 September 1943, the Danish Resistance smuggled Bohr out of Denmark and to Britain, and he participated in Britain's Tube Alloys nuclear weapons project and in the British mission to the Manhattan Project, where he reunited with his protege J. Robert Oppenheimer. After the war, Bohr called for international cooperation on nuclear energy, and he established CERN and the Research Establishment Risø of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission. He became the first chairman of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1957, and he died in Copenhagen in 1962.