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Born in Copenhagen, Denmark on October 7, 1885
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Enrolled in Copenhagen University in 1903 at the age of 18. There he was taught by Professor C. Christiansen, a highly endowed physicist
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Niels Bohr was awarded a gold medal by the Academy of Sciences in Copenhagen for his experimental and theoretical investigation of the surface tension of water. The research was published in the Transactions of the Royal Society
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Awarded a Master's Degree in Physics
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Earned a PhD in Physics
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Worked in Professor Rutherford's lab in Manchester, England. During that time the two worked to improve Rutherford's 1911 model of the structure of an atom. Known as the Rutherford-Bohr model (or the Bohr model for short) the work would be published in 1913. Bohr would later be awarded the Nobel prize for Physics for the work.
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Married to Margrethe Norlund with whom he would have six sons, including two who they lost
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Appointed Professor of Theoretical Physics at Copenhagen University
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He was appointed as the Head of the Copenhagen University Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1920. The position was established for him and he held the position until his death.
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In 1922 Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for "for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them."
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Considered a leading founder of quantum mechanics, perhaps Bohr's most well known quantum mechanical idea was known as complimentarity. The the basic idea was that objects have certain pairs of complimentaty properties which can be measured, but not simultaneously.
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Bohr conceived the principal after his colleague, Werner Heisenburg, published his uncertainty principal, which states that the more precisely the position of some particle the less precisely the momentum can be known and vice versa. Bohr claimed that this was a manifestation of a larger principal.
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Complimentarity can best be explained by the Double-Slit experiment which was originally performed over a century earlier in 1801 by Thomas Young. The experiment demonstrates how matter can exist as both a particle and a wave. However, Bohr purposed that attempting to record its status would result in only one finding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc
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Bohr helped to clarify problems encountered in quantum physics. Specifically he developed the "concept of complementarity." He was able to show how changes in the field of physics affected the fundamental features of the scientific outlook of the time. The works were presented in a series of essays written between 1933 and 1957. The English version of the essays can be found in: Bohr, Niels. Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. Edited by John Wiley and Sons, Science Editions, 1961.
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Died in Copenhagen, Denmark on November 18, 1962
