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Niels Bohr is Born
Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. His parents were Christian Bohr, a professor, and Ellen Adler Bohr. He had an older sister Jenny Bohr and and younger brother Harald Bohr. -
Bohr's Model of the Atomic Model
Right before 1913 the science community thought that electrons moved in a circular orbit with arbitrary radii. Bohr looked into discrete radii, and with this idea he could account for wavelengths in the emission spectrum. The Rutherford Model was unstable because if a charged particle was on a curved path it would emit electromagnetic radiation causing it to spiral out of control. Bohr made the particles move in fixed orbits and energy levels. -
Bohr's Noble Prize
In 1922 Niels Bohr received the Noble Prize in Physics for his work on the atomic structure. -
Bohr's Work with the Periodic Table
In 1923 Georg von Hevesy and Dirk Coster found Hafnium while X-raying a piece of zircon. Hafnium is the 72nd element on the periodic table and is named in Latin after their and Bohr's hometown of Copenhagen. Bohr predicted that a novel element was associated with zirconium. -
Copenhagen Interpretation
In 1925 Niels Bohr and fellow physicists formed an idea called the Copenhagen Interpretation. The point of the theory was that only the probability of a result could be predicted. The idea was presented at the 1927 conference. While Einstein did not agree and thought it illustrated that quantum mechanics was not a complete theory, most approved of the idea and it became the prevailing view of quantum mechanics. -
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The Announcement of Nuclear Fission
In early January 1939 Bohr and two colleagues discovered nuclear fission. They did this by bombarding uranium with neutrons, along with this they also discovered barium. Otto Fisch, another physicist, confirmed this with experiments on 13 January, 1939. Bohr's liquid-drop theory helped the men discover and explain how to split the nucleus to create fission. Niels announced the discovery at the Fifth Conference on Theoretical Physics to the rest of the community on 26 January, 1939. -
Niels Bohr Later Years
After World War II and his work on the Manhattan Project, Bohr served on many boards for schools and groups, most being for physics. In the end of 1962 Bohr died of heart failure, he was survived by his wife, Margrethe, and four of his six sons who all became successful scientists and athletes.
