Niels Bohr

Christmas Day, 1942, was the three hundredth birthday of Isaac Newton. I was then an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Since Newton was our most famous fellow, the college organized a meeting to celebrate his birthday. Since it was war...

In the early evening of March 15, 1933, a group of London socialites gathered in a Westminster mansion to hear a special lecture on the latest developments in nuclear science. The talk was chaired by Winston Churchill. The speaker—Churchill’s friend...

"Einstein Attacks Quantum Theory” read the New York Times headline of May 4, 1935. The article continued:

Professor Albert Einstein will attack science’s important theory of quantum mechanics, a theory of which he was a sort of grandfather. He...

In the two years I spent at the Institute, 1957–59, I had the opportunity of meeting two of the founders of the quantum theory—Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac. In the case of Bohr, perhaps “meeting” overstates the case. He was a Mem­ber in the spring of...

It all began with a cable from Oppenheimer that I received on March 10, 1948, in Trondheim, Norway: ON THE RECOMMENDATION OF BOHR AND HEITLER I AM GLAD TO OFFER YOU MEMBERSHIP SCHOOL OF MATHEMATICS FOR THE ACADEMIC YEAR 1948 – 1949 WITH STIPEND OF $3500. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER.

If two such great thinkers as Bohr and Einstein, who had such a high regard for each other, could be brought together for a prolonged period, would not something emerge of great value to all of us? This thought and this hope animated the guiding spirits of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study to invite Niels Bohr to come as a guest of the Institute for the entire spring semester of 1939.

“Scientific research in many domains of knowledge has time after time proved the necessity of abandoning or remoulding viewpoints which, due to their fruitfulness and apparently unrestricted applicability, were regarded as indispensable for rational...

In November 1946, Frank Aydelotte (Director, 1939–47) invited the poet T. S. Eliot to come to the Institute for Advanced Study as a Member in the School of Historical Studies and the first unofficial artist in residence at the Institute. By the time...