Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge
About this ebook
“The theme of the papers is the epistemological lesson which the modern development of atomic physics has given us and its relevance for analysis and synthesis in many fields of human knowledge.
“The articles in the previous edition were written at a time when the establishment of the mathematical methods of quantum mechanics had created a firm foundation for the consistent treatment of atomic phenomena, and the conditions for an unambiguous account of experience within this framework were characterized by the notion of complementarity. In the papers collected here, this approach is further developed in logical formulation and given broader application.”
About the author
Niels Henrik David Bohr (7 October 1885 - 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.
He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1885 to Christian Bohr, a professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen, and Ellen Adler Bohr, who came from a wealthy Danish Jewish family prominent in banking and parliamentary circles. He was educated at Gammelholm Latin School and enrolled at Copenhagen University in 1903, majoring in physics and also studying astronomy, mathematics and philosophy. He earned his Master’s degree in 1910 and his PhD in 1911, choosing the electron theory of metals as his thesis topic. He developed the groundbreaking Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another. Although the Bohr model has been supplanted by other models, its underlying principles remain valid.
Bohr also founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute, which opened in 1920.
During the 1930s, Bohr helped refugees from Nazism. In 1943 he fled to Sweden and from there to Britain, where he joined the British Tube Alloys nuclear weapons project, and was part of the British mission to the Manhattan Project. After the war, Bohr called for international cooperation on nuclear energy. He was involved with the establishment of CERN and the Research Establishment Risø of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission and became the first chairman of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1957.
He died in Copenhagen in 1962, aged 77.
