5. The Institute

‘The Institute’ describes the work undertaken at Bohr’s headquarters in Copenhagen. It prospered under the ‘Copenhagen Spirit’, as Heisenberg called Bohr’s approach to quantum problems, and money from the Rockefeller, Carlsberg, and Rask-Ørsted Foundations and the Danish government. The Institute saw a decline in the early 1930s owing to Bohr’s doubts about certain productive ideas in nuclear physics that his philosophy seemed to rule out. Their productivity changed his mind and he raised money to build the large apparatus for experimental investigation of the nucleus. At the same time, he applied complementarity to biology and other domains outside of physics, to the dismay of Einstein, who continued to try to find ways to contravene what he called Bohr’s ‘tranquilizing philosophy’.