Neils Bohr

PHYSICIST NAME:Neils Bohr
STUDENT NAME: Angela Mari Peralta

BIOGRAPHY

Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1885. His father, Christian Bohr, a devout Lutheran, was professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen (it is his name which is given to the Bohr shift or Bohr effect), while his mother, Ellen Adler Bohr, came from a wealthy Jewish family prominent in Danish banking and parliamentary circles. His brother was Harald Bohr, a mathematician and Olympic footballer who played on the Danish national team. Niels Bohr was a passionate footballer as well, and the two brothers played a number of matches for the Copenhagen-based Akademisk Boldklub, with Niels in goal. There is, however, no truth in the oft-repeated claim that Niels Bohr emulated his brother Harald by playing for the Danish national team.

In 1903 Bohr enrolled as an undergraduate at Copenhagen University, initially studying philosophy and mathematics. In 1905, prompted by a gold medal competition sponsored by the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, he conducted a series of experiments to examine the properties of surface tension, using his father's laboratory in the university, familiar to him from assisting there since childhood. His essay won the prize, and it was this success that decided Bohr to abandon philosophy and adopt physics. As a student under Christian Christiansen he received his doctorate in 1911. As a post-doctoral student, Bohr first conducted experiments under J. J. Thomson at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1912 he joined Ernest Rutherford at Manchester University and he adapted Rutherford's nuclear structure to Max Planck's quantum theory and so obtained a theory of atomic structure which, with later improvements, mainly as a result of Heisenberg's concepts, remains valid to this day. On the basis of Rutherford's theories, Bohr published his model of atomic structure in 1913, introducing the theory of electrons traveling in orbits around the atom's nucleus, the chemical properties of the element being largely determined by the number of electrons in the outer orbits. Bohr introduced the idea that an electron could drop from a higher-energy orbit to a lower one, emitting a photon (light quantum) of discrete energy. This became a basis for quantum theory. After four productive years with Ernest Rutherford in Manchester, Bohr returned to Denmark becoming in 1918 director of the newly created Institute of Theoretical Physics.

Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe Nørlund Bohr had six sons. Their oldest died in a tragic boating accident and another died from childhood meningitis. The others went on to lead successful lives, including Aage Bohr, who became a very successful physicist and, like his father, won a Nobel Prize in physics, in 1975.

CONTRIBUTIONS

* The Bohr model of the atom, the theory that electrons travel in discrete orbits around the atom's nucleus.
* The shell model of the atom, where the chemical properties of an element are determined by the electrons in the outermost orbit.
* The correspondence principle, the basic tool of Old quantum theory.
* The liquid drop model of the atomic nucleus.
* Identified the isotope of uranium that was responsible for slow-neutron fission - 235U.[10]
* Much work on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.
* The principle of complementarity: that items could be separately analyzed as having several contradictory properties.

OBJECT OF INTEREST

because Bohr's institute served as a focal point for theoretical physicists in the 1920s and '30s, and most of the world's best known theoretical physicists of that period spent some time there. and also bohr and albert eistein had good-natured arguments over the truth of light behaves either as a wave or a stream of particles depending on the experimental framework principle throughout their lives