Who Was Niels Bohr?

While Wally was at the stamp exhibition and I was wandering around Copenhagen, I went to see Christianborg Palace, which serves as Denmark’s capitol, where parliament meets. I don’t remember much about the building, except after a fire old floors were replaced with shining, polished American hardwood from Oregon.

A canal, like a moat, circled around the plaza in front of the palace. On the street facing canal and palace (the most prestigious residential street in Denmark) was a row of majestic townhouses. In Italy each of them would be called a palazzo. One of them had a bronze placard marking the birthplace in 1885 of Niels Bohr.

I knew almost nothing about Niels Bohr until I read his biography before Wally and I went to Denmark with the stamp collectors. According to Wikipedia, he was “one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century.”

His father, Christian Bohr, was a professor at the university, where he met Niels’s mother, Margrethe Norlund, while she was a student. Her father was a prominent Jewish banker, and the future scientist was born in his grandparents' home. The house is impressive, with no portico but tall white marble columns standing against the facade.

Young Niels was a prodigy who “made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics.” He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932.

Germans marched into Denmark in April, 1940, and tried to enlist Bohr to help them develop an atomic bomb. He refused. When the Nazis started to arrest Jews for deportation to death camps, Dr. Bohr got into a small boat with his wife and son and fled to Sweden. From there the family flew to London, then on to New York, and finally to New Mexico. At Los Alamos he worked with the finest group of Novel Prize winners ever assembled in one place. Instead of helping the Germans with their bomb, Niels Bohr helped us build the atomic bomb we dropped on Hiroshima.

After the war he returned to Denmark. His research institute attracted scientists from all over the world in developing atomic energy for peaceful purposes. Bohr died in 1962, so he did not live to see his son, Aage Bohr, receive a Nobel Prize in 1975.

At the end of the big stamp show in Copenhagen, Wally and I took an extra week to travel around Denmark. In Roskilde, as we stood beside cathedral, we saw in the distance across a green valley, the twin pear-shaped towers of the nuclear plant which creates energy to light Denmark’s homes.