Niels Henrik David Bohr, 1885-1962

Niels Bohr was born on 7 October 1885, the son of Professor Christian Bohr, the physiologist, and Ellen, daughter of D. B. Alder, a banker. He had one sister, Jenny, and a brother, Harald, who became Professor of Mathematics in the University of Copenhagen. They grew up in a home of culture. From his father, Niels became acquainted with the problems of biology and in later years became interested again in biological problems through his interests in complementarity. He was educated in Copenhagen, first at the Gammelholm School and then at the University. Whilst there, he became interested in philosophical problems through attending the lectures of Hoffding. According to Rosenfeld (Nordita Publication No. 57) ‘he was fascinated by some of the great religious figures of the past, especially the Jewish prophets and the Buddha; he earnestly endeavoured to penetrate the human side of their teachings and arrived at interpretations of striking originality. Into these sacred texts, coming from the innermost recesses of the human soul, he read an effort to account in a peculiar language for that deepest complementarity between rational knowledge and living experience of the cosmos which in his eyes characterized man’s ambiguous position and rules his whole activity. No wonder that such deep seated views were to play a leading part in his thought in later years and even pervade every shade of his sensitive reaction to the various impressions of everyday life’. During his adolescent years Niels Bohr together with his brother, Harald, were good footballers and his passion for sport was transferred in time to skiing and sailing. He was a lover of the arts and when Eric Gill’s carving of Rutherford installed in the Mond Laboratory at Cambridge was being criticized he was delighted to be presented by Dirac and Kapitza with a copy for his Institute at Copenhagen.