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Birth and scholastic life
Niels Bohr was the son of Christian Bohr, a professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen, and Ellen Bohr, who came from a wealthy Danish family. He was known for being able to work well with his hands and excelled in math and science, though he struggled in his writing classes. He was awarded a gold medal by the Academy of Sciences and Letters for his thesis on the surface tension of water jets, and earned his Master's in 1909. He earned his Doctoral degree in physics in 1911. -
Atomic model and the Niels Bohr Institute (http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/bohr/Constitution_of_atoms_I.pdf)
After receiving a scholarship to study abroad, Bohr studied under J.J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron and isotopes. After just 6 months he was invited to study at Cambridge by Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the atomic structure. Bohr, however, theorized that Rutherford's structure would be unstable using classical physics and required a profound solution. This was published in 3 articles in 1913, and in 1916 he was named a professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen. -
The Nobel Prize
Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his work on the explanation of the atomic structure; this theory was able to accurately map out all of the elements of the periodic table.
https://youtu.be/S1LDJUu4nko -
Niels Bohr, the Philosopher
While skiing in Norway in the winter of 1927, Bohr pondered the duality of matter being either a particle or wave in a very philosophical manner; this led to his idea of "complimentarity". Related to indeterminacy, (simply, that one can't know both the momentum of a particle AND its position) Bohr said, "Just this situation brings out most strikingly the complementary character of the description of atomic phenomena". ("Como Lecture," Supplement to Nature, April 14, 1928, p.584)
