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Born on this day
Desmond Mpilo Tutu
Desmond Mpilo Tutu is a South African social rights activist and a Nobel Prize winner.
41st week in year
7 October 2024

Important personalitiesBack

Niels Henrik David Bohr7.10.1885

Wikipedia (01 Oct 2013, 15:10)

Niels Henrik David Bohr (Danish: [ˈnels ˈboɐ̯ˀ]; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research. In 1943, having a Jewish mother, he fled to Sweden to escape Nazi-persecution and successfully pleaded to the Swedish king to allow refuge to all the 8,000 Danish Jews he fled with.

Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom with the atomic nucleus at the centre and electrons in orbit around it, which he compared to the planets orbiting the Sun. He helped develop quantum mechanics, in which electrons move from one energy level to another in discrete steps, instead of continuously. He founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute, which opened in 1920. Bohr mentored and collaborated with physicists including Hans Kramers, Oskar Klein, George de Hevesy and Werner Heisenberg. He predicted the existence of a new zirconium-like element, which was named hafnium, after Copenhagen, when it was discovered. Later, the element bohrium was named after him. He conceived the principle of complementarity: that items could be separately analysed as having contradictory properties, like behaving as a wave or a stream of particles. The notion of complementarity dominated his thinking on both science and philosophy.

   
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