Google on Sunday recognized Niels Bohr with
a homepage doodle to commemorate the 127th anniversary of the Danish physicist's
birth.
The doodle, one of the search giant's
simpler ones, shows the breakthrough atomic model Bohr conceived of in 1913
taking the place of the first "o" in Google's famous logo. Bohr's
model was the first to conceive of the atomic structure as similar to a solar
system, with electrons spinning around a central nucleus like planets around a
sun, but with the electromagnetic force binding them rather than gravity.
Bohr, born in 1885 in Copenhagen, was
awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922 for this early work published while
he was at Manchester University. In addition to devising a model of the atomic
structure that endures to this day, Bohr also established one of the founding
principles of quantum mechanics with his notion that electrons could move to
lower orbits around the nucleus in incremental steps, emitting a photon as they
do so.
An accomplished athlete in his youth, Bohr
played goalkeeper around the turn of the century for the Copenhagen soccer club
Akademisk Boldklub alongside his brother Harald, a mathematician and Olympic
soccer player for Denmark. Niels Bohr's father Christian Bohr was himself a
distinguished professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen, where
Niels conducted award-winning experiments on the properties of surface tension
and received his doctorate in 1911.
Moving to England, Bohr joined a group of
young physicists at Victoria University of Manchester under the tutelage of
Ernest Rutherford, the pioneering chemist and nuclear physicist, with peers
such as William Lawrence Bragg, James Chadwick, and Hans Geiger.
Bohr returned to the University of
Copenhagen in 1916 to establish and direct its Institute of Theoretical
Physics, which was formed in 1921.
As a guiding light of quantum physics and
promoter of the idea of complementarity—that phenomena like light could be
conceived as having contradictory properties, such as behaving as both a wave
and as a collection of particles, for the purposes of study—Bohr would have a
series of lively but good-natured philosophical debates with Albert Einstein,
noted critic of the notion of quantum indeterminism.
During World War II, the Danish resistance
managed to smuggle Bohr and his wife Margrethe out of Nazi-occupied Denmark to
England in 1943. He then went on to the United States, where he worked using
the pseudonym "Nicholas Baker" at the Los Alamos laboratory in New
Mexico on the Manhattan Project under the direction of Major General Leslie
Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and theoretical physicist J. Robert
Oppenheimer.
Though Bohr's credentials as a physicist
were impeccable, he later described his role at Los Alamos as less about
practical assistance—the Americans "didn't need my help in making the atom
bomb," he would say—and more as an elder statesman of physics who offered
counsel and voiced his concerns about the social impact of developing nuclear
weapons and kicking off a new arms race.
After the war, Bohr returned to Denmark and
continued to advocate politically for the peaceful exchange of nuclear technology
to avoid a devastating nuclear war. One of Niels and Margrethe Bohr's six sons,
Aage Bohr, was also awarded the awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1975, 13
years after his father died in Copenhagen. (Source: pcmag.com)