Physicist — Niels Bohr (Copenhagen 1885 – 1962) was a Danish physicist, among the foremost protagonists of the quantum revolution. In 1913 he proposed his famous model of the atom, in which electrons follow stable quantised orbits and emit or absorb light only by jumping from one level to another, thereby explaining the line spectra of hydrogen. He founded in Copenhagen an institute that became the beating heart of the new physics, training a large part of the twentieth century’s quantum physicists. He is credited with the principle of complementarity and the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, the subject of famous debates with Einstein. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his studies of the structure of atoms.
Fun fact
In his youth he was an excellent football goalkeeper and played for the Danish team Akademisk Boldklub; his brother Harald, a mathematician, went on to win an Olympic silver medal in football in 1908.
Theories and contributions
- Bohr model of the atom — Quantised electron orbits with angular momentum a multiple of : .
- Frequency condition — The energy of the emitted or absorbed photon equals the jump between two levels: .
- Principle of complementarity — Wave and particle aspects of matter are complementary: no single experiment shows them together.
Present in chapters
Linked atoms
11 linked atoms.
21 Introduzione alla meccanica quantistica
- The four great themes of quantum mechanics
- Single-electron interference
- The hydrogen atom model
- The electron as a standing wave
- The four equations of the Bohr model
- Electron spin and the Pauli principle
- The polarising filter
- The four pillars: a single structure
- Waves, particles and the observer problem