Science: Knight of the Elephant

The U.S. also honored a famed scientist last week: Physicist Niels Henrik David Bohr, one of the fathers of atomic fission. President Eisenhower went to Washington’s National Academy of Sciences to address the meeting as Bohr received the first Atoms for Peace Award, a gold medal and a $75,000 tax-free “honorarium” put up by the Ford Motor Co.

Ike called Bohr “a scientist and a great human being who exemplifies principles the world sorely needs—the spirit of friendly scientific inquiry, and the peaceful use of the atom for the satisfaction of human needs.” Replied Bohr: “The rapid advance of science and technology in our age, which involves such bright promises and grave dangers, presents civilization with a most serious challenge. To meet this challenge . . . the road is indicated by that worldwide cooperation which has manifested itself through the ages in the development of science.”

“Against Common Sense.” In his 72 years Niels Bohr has probably received more awards, prizes, decorations, honorary degrees and memberships than any other living scientist. In Denmark he is a Knight of the Elephant, close below the royal family in official social precedence. Although past the age for pioneering research, he is still a powerful influence among his scientist colleagues.

Born and educated in Copenhagen, Bohr went to work with Physicist Ernest Rutherford at the University of Manchester in 1912. Rutherford had shown that atoms have small nuclei around which electrons revolve like planets around miniature suns. In several ways the ‘”Rutherford model of the atom” did not work, but in 1913, when Bohr was 28, he applied to it the strange new concepts of the quantum theory, which bewildered most physicists then as they bewilder most laymen now. The atomic electrons, said unclassical Physicist Bohr, cannot revolve in any old orbit. They must stick to certain particular orbits, and when they jump from one to another, they emit light. In 1913 this theory seemed “against common sense,” but it won against all critics and started physics on the road to understanding the atom.

For this triumph Bohr won a Nobel Prize in 1922, and the Danish government built him a special physics institute in Copenhagen. From the start Bohr’s “Copenhagen School” was international, attracting the best physicists from practically every country possessing good physicists.

“Mr. Baker.” After the Nazis overwhelmed Denmark, Bohr and his wife slipped aboard the fishing boat Sea Star and escaped to Sweden. Eventually he showed up at Los Alamos, the secret New Mexico laboratory where the first atom bombs were taking shape, and where he was known as “Mr. Baker.” The Gestapo searched his house in Denmark but found no atomic secrets. He had taken most of them to freedom in a small black bag. They missed his Nobel gold medal too. He had dissolved it in a bottle of acid and put it on a shelf to await reconstitution after the war.