Niels Bohr founded the Copenhagen institute for physics

Person: Niels Bohr
Lived: 1885–1962
Field: Physics
From: Danish

The story

In 1916 the University of Copenhagen created a chair of theoretical physics especially for Niels Bohr, whose 1913 model of the atom had made him famous. But the young professor had little more than a small office and the duty of teaching physics to medical students. He wanted a proper home for research.

In April 1917 Bohr began a campaign to create an Institute of Theoretical Physics. He won the support of the Danish government and the Carlsberg Foundation, and sizeable contributions came from industry and private donors, many of them Jewish. Legislation establishing the institute passed in November 1918, and it opened on 3 March 1921 with Bohr as director. His family lived in an apartment on the first floor. Even before the doors opened, Oskar Klein and Svein Rosseland had produced its first publication.

Early arrivals came from across Europe: Hans Kramers from the Netherlands, Oskar Klein from Sweden, George de Hevesy from Hungary, Wojciech Rubinowicz from Poland and Rosseland from Norway. Werner Heisenberg first came in 1924 and worked there as a lecturer and Bohr's assistant in 1926 and 1927. Paul Dirac spent six months there from September 1926, and Erwin Schrödinger visited the same year. In 1923 Dirk Coster and de Hevesy discovered the element hafnium in its laboratories, confirming one of Bohr's predictions.

Through the 1920s and 1930s the institute was the focal point of research into quantum mechanics, and most of the world's best-known theoretical physicists spent time in Bohr's company. He was widely admired as a congenial host and an eminent colleague, and the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics takes its name from the city. In the 1930s the institute also became a refuge where Bohr found work for scientists forced out of Nazi Germany.

On 7 October 1965, what would have been Bohr's 80th birthday, the institute was officially given the name it had long carried informally: the Niels Bohr Institute. It remains part of the University of Copenhagen. The Nobel Prize organisation describes it as a legendary research environment and a centre for the development of quantum physics, and it continues to attract researchers from around the world.