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The Early Years
Niels Henrik David Bohr was born October 7, 1885, to Christian and Ellen Bohr in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was the second of three children.
In 1903, Bohr enrolled at University of Copenhagen, where he studied under Professor C. Christiansen, who was a highly endowed physicist. Bohr earned a Master’s degree in Physics in 1909 and a Doctorate degree in 1911.
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First Significant Contribution
Upon completion of his doctorate, Bohr began research in England with Ernest Rutherford at the University of Manchester. Only the year before, Rutherford had "established experimentally that the atom consists of a heavy positively charged nucleus with substantially lighter negatively charged electrons circling around it at considerable distance." Bohr published his idea of the atomic model based on Rutherford's idea of the atomic nucleus.
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Professorship and Complementarity
In 1916, Bohr was offered his second professorship at the University of Copenhagen. There he had Heisenberg assisting him, which is where he came with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Additionally, Bohr theorized complementarity, on the atomic level a physical phenomenon expresses itself differently depending on the experimental setup used to observe it. In 1927, he presented it at a conference in Como, Italy.
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Fission and the Atomic Bomb
In 1939, the Germans discovered they could split an atom. Bohr worked with colleague John Wheeler at Princeton University on the theory to explain the phenomenon. In 1943, Bohr joined the Allied project after escaping arrest. For several weeks at a time, he worked in Los Alamos, New Mexico, making significant technical contributions to the atomic bomb.
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