Professor Niels Bohr, c mid-20th century

Niels Henrik David Bohr, 7 October 1885, 18 November 1962. Bohr was a Danish theoretical physicist. He is well-known for his foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory. Bohr received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for this work. In 1903, Bohr enrolled in the Copenhagen University, studying physics, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy. He earned a mathematics Masters degree in 1909. He achieved his doctoral thesis in 1911. In 1912, Bohr met his wife Margrethe Nørlund. They had six sons. Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, and although the model has since been supplanted, the principal aspects of the model remain poignant. Bohr founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now the Niels Bohr Institute. In the 1930s, Bohr helped individuals from the scientific community to seek refuge due to Nazism. After Denmark was occupied in 1941, he met with Werner Heisenberg, head of the German nuclear weapon project. The contents of this discussion are a point of popular speculation. In September 1943, the brothers Bohr learned that the Nazis considered them to be Jewish as their mother was, and therefore they risked arrest. Bohr fled to Sweden, at which point he begged King Gustaf V of Sweden to make it known to the public that Sweden was willing to accept Jewish refugees, leading to many Danish Jewish people to flee there. Lord Cherwell of Britain asked Bohr to come to the UK, and he arrived in Scotland in October 1943, the journey of which nearly killed him due to oxygen starvation. Bohr's arrival to the UK was kept secret for his safety, and he worked with British Tube Alloys nuclear weaponry team. He travelled to Washington D.C. in December 1943, where he met the director of the Manhattan Project, and also visited Einstein at Princeton. He lived under the alias 'Nicholas Baker' for safety reasons. Although Bohr did not stay at Los Alamos with the Manhattan Project, he visited frequently, with Oppenheimer crediting him as a father figure to the younger scientists there. Bohr believed that the Western Allies should be sharing their nuclear developments with the Russians, in order to speed up results, but neither Churchill or Roosevelt agreed, and to that end saw Bohr as a potential information leak to the Russians that needed to be monitored. In 1945, Bohr returned to Copenhagen and was re-elected as President of the Royal Danish Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was conferred to the Order of the Elephant by King Frederik IX, an honour reserved for royalty and the heads of state, but the King awarded Bohr stating it honoured both Bohr and Danish science. In 1950, Bohr addressed an open letter to the UN calling for international cooperation on matters of nuclear energy. The International Atomic Energy Agency was thus founded after the USSR held its first nuclear test. In 1957, Bohr received the first ever Atoms for Peace Award. Bohr declared his support to CERN in 1952. In 1962, Bohr died of heart failure in Carlsberg, aged 77. Bohr received many accolades across his life, the Franklin Medal (1926), the Faraday Lectureship Prize (1930), the Max Planck Medal (1930), and the Copley Medal (1938).