Danish physicist and Nobel Prize winner born in Copenhagen and educated at Copenhagen University, he went to England to work with Sir J J Thompson at Cambridge and Ernest Rutherford at Manchester University and returned to Copenhagen University as Professor (1916).
He greatly extended the theory of atomic structure when he explained the spectrum of hydrogen by means of Rutherford’s atomic model and the quantum theories of Albert Einstein and Max Planck (1913).
Bohr model later shown to be solution of Erwin Schrodinger’s equation.
During World War II he escaped from German-occupied Denmark and assisted atom bomb research in the US, returning to Copenhagen in 1945.
He later worked on nuclear physics and developed the liquid drop model of the nucleus used by Hans Bethe and Baron Carl vou Weizsacker.
He was founder and director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Copenhagen, (1920-22) and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922.
His son, Aage Niels Bohr, won the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Niels Bohr
