Niels Bohr

He was born in Copenhagen, the son of Christian Bohr, a devout Lutheran and
professor of physiology at the city's university, and Ellen Adler, a member of a
wealthy Jewish family of great importance in Danish banking and "parliamentary
circles". After obtaining his doctorate at the University of Copenhagen in 1911 and
trying to continue his studies at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge with the
physicist Joseph John Thomson, discoverer of the electron (the subject of Bohr's
thesis) and 1906 Nobel laureate, who had little of interest in the young Bohr, he
finished his studies in Manchester Under Ernest Rutherford, with whom he created a
lasting scientific and
In 1916, Niels Bohr began work as a professor of theoretical physics at the
University of Copenhagen and raised funds to found the Nordic Institute for
Theoretical Physics, which he led from 1920 until his death.
In 1943, when the Second World War was raging, Bohr fled to Sweden to avoid arrest
by the German police and later traveled to London. While protected, he supported
Anglo-American efforts to develop nuclear weapons, believing that the German bomb
was imminent, and worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA.
After the war, he returned to Copenhagen, where he lived until his death in 1962,
and advocated the peaceful use of nuclear energy. His younger brother Harald Bohr
was also a well-known mathematician and Olympic soccer player, [4] and the two
brothers played together in Akademisk Boldklub, where Niels Bohr was the
goalkeeper. 4
Niels' son, Aage Niels Bohr, studied at the institute headed by his father,
succeeded him as director and also won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1975.