Bohr, Niels Henrik David

(1885–1962)

   Danish physicist and Nobel laureate, 1922. Born in Copenhagen to a non-Jewish father and a Jewish mother, Bohr received a doctorate from Copenhagen University in 1911. He worked in Manchester with Sir Ernest Rutherford, the British physicist, and produced an important series of papers on the structure of the atom. In 1916 he was appointed professor of chemical physics at Copenhagen. The Institute of Theoretical Physics he headed (1920) rapidly became a centre for theoretical physicists from all over the world. In 1922 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. With the Nazi invasion of Denmark, Bohr and his family were taken to Sweden in a small fishing boat, and from there flown to London to work on the atomic bomb project.

   Like many others who had worked to develop the bomb, Bohr regarded it as a threat to mankind. For the last fifteen years of his life, he worked to outlaw the bomb and to use atomic energy for peaceful purposes. He played an active role in the development of the physics department of the Weizmann Institute in Israel, which he visited several times.