![]() He had been prepared for the challenge by the circumstances of his upbringing.īorn into an academic family in Copenhagen in 1885, Bohr benefited from a rich intellectual home life. While others deplored the quantum’s contradictions, he exploited them. A few years later Einstein argued that all radiation, including light, was not only emitted but transmitted in such packets (later called photons) even though light was known to travel as a wave.ĭuring the first decade of the 20th century only a few scientists took Planck seriously, and even fewer believed Einstein. From experiments on heat radiation, Planck had deduced that energy could be emitted from a hot object only in indivisible packets called quanta, sort of the way sand consists of individual grains. Various clues hinted that solving the electron quandary would require Max Planck’s quantum idea, introduced in 1900. “He reached the conclusion that there was no possible way classical physics could explain what happened in the behavior of electrons in metals,” says physicist Alfred Goldhaber of Stony Brook University in New York. He found that electrons carrying current and those bound to atoms behaved in different ways, at odds with the ordinary mechanical laws of classical physics. “That, of course, was the key to Bohr’s great invention,” says science historian John Heilbron, of the University of California, Berkeley.īohr had foreseen the need for quantum theory when investigating the electron theory of metals for his 1911 doctoral dissertation. He was certain, though, that explaining the atom required quantum physics. He knew from the beginning that his atom model was too simple to capture all of reality’s complexities. Like most fathers, Bohr was proud of his offspring. ![]() “In that sense he may be considered the father of the atom.” Robert Oppenheimer observed, in the development of modern quantum physics, “the deeply creative and subtle and critical spirit of Niels Bohr guided, restrained, deepened, and finally transmuted the enterprise.”īohr’s role in that enterprise began in 1913 with a series of three papers that became the foundation for the future of atomic science.īohr “gave the first firm and lasting direction toward an understanding of atomic structure and atomic dynamics,” physicist Abraham Pais wrote in his biography of Bohr, Niels Bohr’s Times (1991). In the decades following his description of the atom, Bohr served as guide and interpreter for the world’s physicists as they explored the strange new quantum world. When two roads diverged, he traveled both but remained one traveler, insisting that knowing reality meant accepting the truth of mutually incompatible viewpoints. While quantum confusions drove other physicists to despair, Bohr pursued the path into the yellow quantum wood. Bohr saw more deeply than others of his time that embracing quantum physics was the key to unlocking nature’s hidden truths. And most consequential of all, he established the fundamental role of quantum physics in describing the underlying reality of the universe.Įven though the technical details of Bohr’s model turned out to be wrong, he had grasped the essential idea for understanding atoms: abandoning common sense in favor of the crazy rules of quantum theory. He explained the mysterious repetition of properties displayed by the periodic table of the chemical elements. Bohr figured out the basics of how atoms hook up to make molecules. A century ago, Niels Bohr married the old standard physics with the new quantum theory, giving birth to the modern model of the atom’s structure.īohr’s atom did more than simply reconcile theory with experiment. Into this paradox stepped a great Dane, a genius conditioned by his culture to embrace conflicting ideas and learn from them. (Even if they didn’t, their mutually repulsive negative charges would blast them out of their orbits.) Yet somehow atoms housed negative and positive charges happily. ![]() Opposite charges attract each other relentlessly electrons should spiral into the atom’s positive nucleus in less than a millisecond. But Rutherford’s atom baffled everyone even more, as the laws of physics prohibited the arrangement that he described.
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