Bohr’s Copenhagen tour
July 8, 2024
Outside the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen with a copy of Manjit Kumar’s brilliant QUANTUM. Manjit couldn’t make it so I filled in for him on Kirker Holidays’ “Bohr’s Copenhagen” tour.
Niels Bohr with Max Planck, who in 1900 introduced the quantum into physics to explain the heat emitted by a furnace (technically, a “black body”). Planck thought it was merely a mathematical sleight of hand but there was no turning back. He had let the genie out of the bottle!
“An alligator sandwich, please, and make it snappy!” Sandwich bar, Copenhagen.
Amazing to sit in the same seats where the titans of 20th-century physics once sat! Front row: Bohr, Dirac, Heisenberg… Lise Meitner, discoverer of nuclear fission who was scandalously overlooked for the Nobel Prize
Explaining the Bohr model of the atom on Niels Bohr’s blackboard! It sends a shiver down my spine even thinking about it. This is where Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac, Pauli and the rest sweated blood wrestling with the utterly insane quantum world lurking beneath the skin of reality.
Bohr’s heroes (and friends) – Ernest Rutherford and Albert Einstein – in the corner of his office
In Neil’s Bohr’s office, chatting with the Institute archivist (left) and Kirker tour guide, Graeme. On the wall are the photographs of everyone who was at the Institute each year, excluding the war years when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis.
“Heisenberg, you’re talking utter rubbish!” Me channelling Niels Bohr at Niels Bohr’s desk in Copenhagen. His office is exactly the way he left it when he died in 1962.
You’d be happy too if you’d just bought two Danish pastries from the best Danish pastry bakery in Copenhagen! (Sankt Peder’s)
Niels Bohr (right) with his mother, Ellen, and brother Harald, a mathematician. Harald was once asked why he was such a good lecturer and Niels such a terrible one. “I lecture on what I can explain,” he said. “Niels lectures on what he cannot explain.”
Bored by Bohr!
Every suit of armour should have… elephant arms (Rosenborg Castle, Copenhagen)
Physicist & Bohr aficionado Johanne de Leon explains the Balmer photons, emitted when an electron in a hydrogen atom drops from the 3rd to the 2nd “orbit:, 4th to 2nd, 5th to 2nd, and so on. The Lyman photons, when an electron drops to 1st energy level are not visible but uv
Something that encapsulates the madness of quantum theory is that J. J. Thomson got the Nobel Prize for showing the electron is a particle and his son got the Nobel for showing that it isn’t! This is how I imagine Thomson family parties, with J. J. and his son at loggerheads…
