Word: bohr
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...gentleman who helped create the world's most deadly weapon; a humble man who collected as many honors as almost any man of his time. Before he died of a heart attack last week at 77, Danish Physicist Niels Bohr left an unmistakable imprint on the 20th century...
...always wanted to be a physicist, Niels Henrik David Bohr could have chosen no better age in which to live. By the time he was in college, physics was in fascinating chaos. Blow after blow had shattered its foundations: Albert Einstein proved that matter is energy, Max Planck proved that energy comes in indivisible packets he called quanta. Lord Rutherford proved that though the very name atom means "indivisible" in Greek, atoms are not indivisible. Nothing seemed certain. One physicist declared that all students should be warned: "Caution! Dangerous structure! Closed for reconstruction...
Chewing on Stubs. In this chaos Bohr found his own future. In 1912, he went to Rutherford's laboratory at Manchester, England, just after Rutherford had advanced the theory that atoms are miniature solar systems with electrons revolving like planets around a sunlike nucleus. The idea had serious faults, which Bohr, then 27, spotted promptly; he corrected them by applying the unfamiliar principles of Planck's new quantum theory...
...Bohr's atomic model answered dozens of questions that had the physicists of the time chewing their pencil stubs. It won him a Nobel Prize, but it, too, had faults which were gradually corrected by mathematical abstractions that seemed to grow more and more bizarre. Bohr himself did much of the correcting, and even the most recent concepts of atomic structure reflect his genius for inventive analysis...
...Manhattan's Village Gate cabaret, Navarro announces (in Spanish and infant English) that the great liner is setting sail from New York-"ba-hoooooo." Then Spain and 10,000 oles as the matador enters the corrida. A veronica ("shwuss") and the bull flies past ("bohr-uhm, bohr-uhm"). Another 10,000 oles. With only a word here and there, Navarro moves on to England for the Queen's birthday and produces an affair of state: troops marching, planes swooping close by them (the sound of both at once), rifle fire, drums, bagpipes, bugles, hoofbeats, helicopters...