There's gratitude, and then there's gratitude. Physicist Niels Bohr must have been aware of just how much his fellow Danes appreciated him. After all, after he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, the Carlsberg Brewery gave him a house located next to the brewery. The best part? It had a direct pipeline to the brewery, so he had free beer on tap, on demand. Now that's gratitude.
With the help of the Carlsberg Brewery's scientific foundation and the Danish government, Bohr founded the Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1921, where much of the groundwork for our understanding of quantum mechanics was laid. Fellow physicist Albert Einstein did not agree with many of Bohr's theories, but Bohr's work has been proven scientifically sound.
Bohr had 115 publications to his name, and was president of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, the Danish Cancer Committee and chairman of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission, among his many titles and honors.
Other facts about Niels Bohr:
- Niels Bohr escaped Denmark during the German occupation and spent the last two years of World War II in England and the United States.
- He proposed a theory for the hydrogen atom based on quantum theory, postulating that energy is transferred only in certain defined quantities.
- Bohr advocated for the peaceful application of atomic physics.
