01 Biography
Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen in 1885 and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 for his atomic model, which introduced the idea of discrete electron energy levels. He founded the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, which became a centre of 20th-century theoretical physics. When Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, he continued working and helping Jewish scientists escape. In 1943, warned of imminent arrest, he escaped by fishing boat to Sweden, then flew to Britain (nearly passing out in the unheated bomb bay of a Mosquito), and joined the Manhattan Project under the alias "Nicholas Baker." He was deeply troubled by what he saw and spent the rest of his life advocating for open international nuclear cooperation, meeting both Churchill and Roosevelt to argue against nuclear secrecy.
02 Key Achievements
03 Notable Quote
"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a very narrow field."
04 Legacy
Bohrium (element 107) is named after him. His insistence on openness and international cooperation in nuclear science was decades ahead of its time - ideas that eventually shaped the IAEA.