Word: bohr
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Golden Age. In 1920, Bohr organized the University of Copenhagen Institute for Theoretical Physics, which quickly became a kind of scientific shrine, attracting students from all over the world. "The unique and exciting feature of Copenhagen," wrote Professor John A. Wheeler of Princeton, "lies in the stimulus that Bohr gives. I know of nothing with which to compare it except the school of Plato." J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was later to head the atom-bomb-making Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, said about physics in the 19205: "It was a heroic time. It was not the doing...
...Niels Bohr deeply resented any restrictions that hindered the search for scientific truth. When the Nazis began to harass the great German universities, he wrote to physicists who he thought might be in danger of persecution and invited them to Copenhagen. Many came, and whenever any of them arrived, Bohr always made certain that he or one of his colleagues was at the railroad station to welcome them to his pleasant refuge...
Early in 1939, before the start of World War II, Bohr made a trip to the U.S. Just as his ship was about to leave Copenhagen, two German refugee physicists, Lise Meitner and O. R. Frisch, rushed aboard with a dismaying report. They had just heard that German Chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin had split the uranium atom. This was atomic fission, and with it the Nazis might soon be able to build an atomic bomb...
...Bohr took the terrible news with him to New York and passed it along to U.S. physicists whom he trusted. By then the U.S. was well supplied with first-rank physicists, many of them Bohr's former students; they understood only too well the implications of his message. Soon confirming experiments were in full swing. Bohr himself worked for a while at Princeton. And there, one snowy night as he walked from his club to a laboratory, a problem that he had been puzzling over was unexpectedly resolved and the facts fell into place. Bohr realized that...
...returned to Copenhagen before the Nazis overran Denmark in April 1940. At first they did not bother Bohr, despite his part-Jewish ancestry. Then, in 1943, he learned that he was slated for arrest. That same night Bohr, his wife and his son Aage sneaked aboard the fishing boat Sea Star and escaped to Sweden. (He was the kind of man about whom absent-minded professor stories are told, and legend has it that he had kept a bottle of heavy water, then important for atomic research, hidden in his refrigerator; in his hasty departure he left the heavy water...