Neils Bohr (1885-1962)

  • Bohr's atomic model

    Bohr's atomic model
    [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm2C0ovz-3M] Bohr's atomic model, perhaps his best known work, was introduced in 1913. This supposed the idea of electron "shells" or energy levels. This improved upon Rutherford's model and gave a theoretical explanation for a more stable atom. It also gave a better explanation for experimental data, such as the Hydrogen spectral line series.
  • Bohr is awarded the Nobel Prize

    Bohr applied his new atomic model to the periodic table, building it up one electron after another, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them." Physical chemist Georg Hevesy, together with the physicist Dirk Coster, discovered the unknown 72 atomic element, hafnium, one year later and it behaved exactly as Bohr predicted.
  • Complementarity Principle

    Bohr's most famous work in the philosophy of science, the complementarity principle, states that "on the atomic level a physical phenomenon expresses itself differently depending on the experimental setup used to observe it." (Brittanica) Thus why, depending on the experiment, light would behave as both a partical and a wave. It states that both classical physics and quantum physics are both needed to interpret experimental results, and are complementary to each other.
  • Explaining Fisson

    Explaining Fisson
    In 1938 Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann made the discovery that a uranium atom can be split into two equal halves when bombarded with neutons, based on Bohr's theory of a compound nucleus. Bohr raced tirelessly with the help of John Wheeler to explain the physics of fission theoretically.