Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge

by Niels Bohr

Overview

This collection of articles, which were first published in 1958 and written on various occasions between 1932 and 1957, forms a sequel to Danish physician Niels Bohr’s earlier essays in Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature (1934).

“The theme of the papers is the epistemological lesson which the modern development of atomic physics has given us and its relevance for analysis and synthesis in many fields of human knowledge.

“The articles in the previous edition were written at a time when the establishment of the mathematical methods of quantum mechanics had created a firm foundation for the consistent treatment of atomic phenomena, and the conditions for an unambiguous account of experience within this framework were characterized by the notion of complementarity. In the papers collected here, this approach is further developed in logical formulation and given broader application.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781787208933
Publisher:	Muriwai Books
Publication date:	01/12/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	97
File size:	816 KB

About the Author

Niels Henrik David Bohr (7 October 1885 - 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.

He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1885 to Christian Bohr, a professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen, and Ellen Adler Bohr, who came from a wealthy Danish Jewish family prominent in banking and parliamentary circles. He was educated at Gammelholm Latin School and enrolled at Copenhagen University in 1903, majoring in physics and also studying astronomy, mathematics and philosophy. He earned his Master’s degree in 1910 and his PhD in 1911, choosing the electron theory of metals as his thesis topic. He developed the groundbreaking Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another. Although the Bohr model has been supplanted by other models, its underlying principles remain valid.

Bohr also founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute, which opened in 1920.

During the 1930s, Bohr helped refugees from Nazism. In 1943 he fled to Sweden and from there to Britain, where he joined the British Tube Alloys nuclear weapons project, and was part of the British mission to the Manhattan Project. After the war, Bohr called for international cooperation on nuclear energy. He was involved with the establishment of CERN and the Research Establishment Risø of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission and became the first chairman of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1957.

He died in Copenhagen in 1962, aged 77.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Light And Life 3

Address at the opening meeting of the International Congress on Light Therapy in Copenhagen, August 1932. Printed in Nature, 131, 421 (1933).

Biology And Atomic Physics 13

Address at the Physical and Biological Congress in memory of Luigi Galvani, Bologna, October 1937.

Natural Philosophy And Human Cultures 23

Address at the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Copenhagen, delivered at a meeting in Kronborg Castle, Elsinore, August 1938. Printed in Nature, 143, 268 (1939).

Discussion With Einstein On Epistemological Problems In Atomic Physics 32

Contribution to Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist. The Library of Living Philosophers, Inc., Evanston, Illinois, vol. 7, 1949, p. 199.

Unity Of Knowledge 67

Address delivered at a conference in October 1954 in connection with the Bicentennial of Columbia University, New York. Printed in The Unity of Knowledge, Doubleday and Co., New York, 1955, p. 47.

Atoms And Human Knowledge 83

Address delivered at a meeting of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences in Copenhagen, October 1955.

Physical Science And The Problem Of Life 94

Article completed in 1957 and based on a Steno Lecture in the Danish Medical Society, Copenhagen, February 1949.