Niels Bohr (7 Oct 1885 - 18 Nov 1962)

  • Bohr's mathematic atomic model submitted

    In 1913, Niels Bohr submitted his atomic model where he expanded on Rutherford's model which stated that atoms are mostly made of empty space, an that the mass is nearly all in the nucleus of the atom. Bohr's model states that atoms are kept stable because electrons orbit at fixed distances around a nucleus. This prevents the atom from collapsing in on itself, becoming a mass of neutrons rather than a stable atom.
  • Winning the Nobel Prize

    Bohr won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1922 for his atomic model.
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    Working on the Atomic Bomb

    After two colleagues discovered that a uranium atom could be split in nearly equal halves by bombarding it with neutrons, there was a race to confirm nuclear fission experimentally. Bohr spent much of his time in Los Alamos, where he made many contributions, including the catalyst for the plutonium bomb. Both of these bombs were dropped in 1945 on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
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    An open world

    Bohr thought that the first step toward avoiding a postwar nuclear arms race would be to inform the ally in the war, the Soviet Union, of the project. He set out to convince allied leaders to do this. After personal interviews with Churchill and Roosevelt, he was rejected. He wrote and open letter on the subject to the UN in 1950