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Very Short Introductions #627
Niels Bohr: A Very Short Introduction
Niels Bohr, who pioneered the quantum theory of the atom, had a broad conception of his obligations as a physicist. They included not only a responsibility for the consequences of his work for the wider society, but also a compulsion to apply the philosophy he deduced from his physics to improving ordinary people's understanding of the moral universe they inhabit. In some of these concerns Bohr resembled Einstein, although Einstein could not accept what he called the
"tranquilizing philosophy" with which Bohr tried to resolve such ancient conundrums as the nature (or possibility) of free will.
In this Very Short Introduction John Heilbron draws on sources never before presented in English to cover the life and work of one of the most creative physicists of the 20th century. In addition to his role as a scientist, Heilbron considers Bohr as a statesman and Danish cultural icon, who built scientific institutions and pushed for the extension of international cooperation in science to all nation states. As a humanist he was concerned with the cultivation of all sides of the
individual, and with the complementary contributions of all peoples to the sum of human culture. Throughout, Heilbron considers how all of these aspects of Bohr's personality influenced his work, as well as the science that made him, in the words of Sir Henry Dale, President of the Royal Society of London, probably the "first among all the men of all countries who are now active in any department of science."
ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
"tranquilizing philosophy" with which Bohr tried to resolve such ancient conundrums as the nature (or possibility) of free will.
In this Very Short Introduction John Heilbron draws on sources never before presented in English to cover the life and work of one of the most creative physicists of the 20th century. In addition to his role as a scientist, Heilbron considers Bohr as a statesman and Danish cultural icon, who built scientific institutions and pushed for the extension of international cooperation in science to all nation states. As a humanist he was concerned with the cultivation of all sides of the
individual, and with the complementary contributions of all peoples to the sum of human culture. Throughout, Heilbron considers how all of these aspects of Bohr's personality influenced his work, as well as the science that made him, in the words of Sir Henry Dale, President of the Royal Society of London, probably the "first among all the men of all countries who are now active in any department of science."
ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
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Published March 1, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 31, 2020
Magnificent. I’ve read a few stellar books this year, but I am glad to have finished this one before 2020 went out, because it was the best read of the entire year (and since it’s close to the last one I’ve read, chances are, I won’t be able to revise this opinion!). Oxford’s short books have done it again, and it’s done superbly. For anyone interested in quantum mechanics, either as a study for practical purposes (sort of like me), a hobby/amatuer (more like me), or something professional/research related, this book is a must-read (unless you’re already familiar with Bohr’s struggles against formalism while developing his early models -but still, maybe there’s a morsel of information here that may be worth your while), and at a MSRP of 7.99, it’s a no-brainer.
Why do I love this book? Because it does what almost no biography or technical (or quasi-technical in this case) book in science (which I mean to also include math, CS, and “engineering” -despite what scientists think of that inclusion) does currently, it goes through the failures (and success) of Bohr’s attempt to build a quantum theory (but to be sure, the pioneering of a new field almost always has more failures than successes). Learning from success is hard, but learning from failure is… less hard, and I’ve gotten much out of reading Bohr’s failures and early attempts to model energy spectra and atomic behavior.
Bohr (and many of the first generation of quantum physicists) had many failures because the phenomena at the atomic/subatomic scale behave nothing like phenomena at larger ‘macro’ scales. This has become so well known in contemporary society that it’s become a sort of truism, but in Bohr’s time, this notion was a novelty. In fact, it was not believed by most academics, and many decades were spent running experimentation that confirmed the discordance of classical mechanical predictions with data for these phenomena. Further, for every experimenteer, there were multiple more theorists, who were looking to combine those facts together into something meaningful. So much more that many of these people were disparaged by ‘professional’ scientists as ‘dreamers’. Einstein was often labeled as one of these ‘dreamers’, as unlike our era, experimentation had primacy over theory in this era (this would be flipped during the mid 20th-century).
One of the great features of this book (and Oxford shorts in general), is that it does not take long for the text to get into the meat. In fact, after about ⅕ of the printed material, which gives over Bohr’s birth, family, and the society he grew up in (the “viking Jews” as labeled in the text had family experiences distinct from Ashkahnazi Jews of eastern Europe, which often experienced harsher lives in their region), the text goes straight into Bohr’s thoughts. We start with Bohr’s thoughts/analysis of “Plank’s Oven Problem'', or finding a formula P(v,T) such that P is the intensity, v is the frequency, and T is the temperature, that would characterize the ‘energy spectrum’ of radiation between two oven walls which are at constant temperature, T. This problem was motivated by the “ultraviolet catastrophe” of the early 20th century, where models of blackbody radiation using classical mechanical predicates failed to concord with observations.
Bohr’s approach is interesting, because it’s clear he has a very modern understanding of what a mathematical model is, and what it is not. Men like Einstein had a fanciful notion that the models they discovered were somehow “real”, in an almost occult sense, that they had understood something intrinsic to ‘nature’ and that the intuition they leveraged to surface those models were themselves somehow “essential” to the nature in a global sense. This would later evolve into the principle of “physical realism”. Bohr seems to have had none of these biases in his metaphysics (or physics). The reason why, according to the author, is that Bohr was steeped in the philosophy of Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard. Although, I’ve not yet read this person’s work, according to the author, J.L Hebron, Kierkegaard advocated for the notion that “we” could never really understand reality, or account for “being” because our attempt to account for it, would change it, and this dual dance between observer and observee would continue indefinitely. There were many philosophers in this era that were struggling with these sort of existential conundrums in this era, which includes things like Russell’s antinomy.
However, for those who have read some previous layman work on quantum mechanics (QM) before (or who have practiced it scholastically), they should see an immediate connection between this notion and something like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principles, pioneered 15 - 16 years after Bohr’s initial work. More broadly, the challenge of “what is a measurement”, which is intimately related to the observer/observee conundrum has never fully been resolved within QM, and is actively debated even today. Bohr imbibed these notions deeply during his young adulthood, in his masters degree training, and seemed to have viewed models more as utility, approximations. As stated, this notion is extremely modern, and has only gained more wide acceptance during the era of cheap computing.
Hebron does us a great service by accounting the step-wise choices Bohr makes in tackling this “oven problem” (and the extension challenges derived from it) for much of chapter 2 & 3. What’s great also is that besides some facility with algebraic manipulation (in the classical sense), and some knowledge of trigonometric facts, much of this material is digestible to the general reader. The only apparatus that is probably harder to grasp are Bohr’s paper-and-compass constructions of orbits. Unfortunately, much of these geometric skills have been lost to most primary/secondary school students (and even college level mathematics students may need significant tutoring to get up to speed).
Still, from the basic “principle of equipartition of energy”, Bohr leverages what looks like a “particle in the box” construct, to show why “jumps” are needed between various wave-modes, because otherwise energy (and thus heat) would concentrate on the higher wavelength modes, which is inconsistent with the data. This first “break” between a theory that predicates “continuous” or smooth observable mechanism, and one that exhibits discontinuity are the initial steps towards what would become QM. But what’s so exhilarating is that we see the motivations for these (and his subsequent) steps, and more often than not, it is not recondite to the average thinker.
Bohr believes in one thing, then someone tells him about a ‘bridge’ to his problem, say Balmer’s function, he uses it, then he changes his mind. So goes this process, step-by-step, and we as the reader really feel like we are discovering this process with Bohr. It was very exciting. What’s most interesting to read is how with each step he slowly jettisons the classical mechanics. He first constructs the atomic model geometrically, in the way that stellar bodies are arrayed larger stellar bodies and are bound to it via gravity. We see intricate calculations/constructions in the planar geometry. However, he realizes after trying to fudge his model with facts, via what few “free parameters” available to him, that he cannot achieve the result. So what does he do? He removes those assumptions, but he does not totally expunge them from his mind, even the matured first model of the atom uses the “mental gimmick” of mechanics to facilitate understanding in the mind, but he knows this is purely a trick. Bohr will eventually state that although his theory was motivated/intuited from classical mechanics, it has no relation to it. But this is mysterious, how could one extract meaningful truth from false analogs? This ends up becoming philosophical very quickly, and we see the beginnings of Bohr's famous “correspondence principles” within this thread of thinking.
It is interesting to note, despite what became known as the “shut up and calculate” school of thought from QM, that Bohr, and the first generation of quantum physicists it obviously were very philosophic people, and we should not expect anything different, as with the start of any theory, all you have in the beginning of any theory, are the basic facts, mathematics, and your wits, so the fact that Bohr was influenced by philosophy and meta-physics himself should not surprise anyone, and it should point the way for future researchers to not shy away from “softer” approaches/thoughts on their subject matters.
Lastly, I”ll say that this is the first time in any of the books I’ve read in the past few years, that I’ve gotten this feeling. More often than not, a textbook treatment of a formalism will approach the material fully formed. The unfortunate problem with this approach is the student often gets no understanding of how that thing was derived. They may get some stylized examples of how one *may* derive certain statements in the formalism, but because the formalism has the advantage of being fully-formed, often times these derivations have an air unachievable elegance to the common student, like a boy pining after a movie star, it is pure fantasy, and not within the grasp of the adolescence. Yet, these people are just humans. Bohr was just a human (even Einstein). So reading (and more importantly working through) the analytic struggles, and intermediary thoughts they had whilst developing their work is very critical to the maturity of the mind, and this book achieves just this (if only for a moment). My only complaint is it’s barely 120 pages long, and I could read something 3 or 4 times this length from this author (or this series).
Overall, I highly recommend this book. Thus far, I’ve not been disappointed by the “Oxford Shorts”, they are indeed short, but they pack enough functional information that is worth the value and time spent going through them.
Why do I love this book? Because it does what almost no biography or technical (or quasi-technical in this case) book in science (which I mean to also include math, CS, and “engineering” -despite what scientists think of that inclusion) does currently, it goes through the failures (and success) of Bohr’s attempt to build a quantum theory (but to be sure, the pioneering of a new field almost always has more failures than successes). Learning from success is hard, but learning from failure is… less hard, and I’ve gotten much out of reading Bohr’s failures and early attempts to model energy spectra and atomic behavior.
Bohr (and many of the first generation of quantum physicists) had many failures because the phenomena at the atomic/subatomic scale behave nothing like phenomena at larger ‘macro’ scales. This has become so well known in contemporary society that it’s become a sort of truism, but in Bohr’s time, this notion was a novelty. In fact, it was not believed by most academics, and many decades were spent running experimentation that confirmed the discordance of classical mechanical predictions with data for these phenomena. Further, for every experimenteer, there were multiple more theorists, who were looking to combine those facts together into something meaningful. So much more that many of these people were disparaged by ‘professional’ scientists as ‘dreamers’. Einstein was often labeled as one of these ‘dreamers’, as unlike our era, experimentation had primacy over theory in this era (this would be flipped during the mid 20th-century).
One of the great features of this book (and Oxford shorts in general), is that it does not take long for the text to get into the meat. In fact, after about ⅕ of the printed material, which gives over Bohr’s birth, family, and the society he grew up in (the “viking Jews” as labeled in the text had family experiences distinct from Ashkahnazi Jews of eastern Europe, which often experienced harsher lives in their region), the text goes straight into Bohr’s thoughts. We start with Bohr’s thoughts/analysis of “Plank’s Oven Problem'', or finding a formula P(v,T) such that P is the intensity, v is the frequency, and T is the temperature, that would characterize the ‘energy spectrum’ of radiation between two oven walls which are at constant temperature, T. This problem was motivated by the “ultraviolet catastrophe” of the early 20th century, where models of blackbody radiation using classical mechanical predicates failed to concord with observations.
Bohr’s approach is interesting, because it’s clear he has a very modern understanding of what a mathematical model is, and what it is not. Men like Einstein had a fanciful notion that the models they discovered were somehow “real”, in an almost occult sense, that they had understood something intrinsic to ‘nature’ and that the intuition they leveraged to surface those models were themselves somehow “essential” to the nature in a global sense. This would later evolve into the principle of “physical realism”. Bohr seems to have had none of these biases in his metaphysics (or physics). The reason why, according to the author, is that Bohr was steeped in the philosophy of Danish thinker Soren Kierkegaard. Although, I’ve not yet read this person’s work, according to the author, J.L Hebron, Kierkegaard advocated for the notion that “we” could never really understand reality, or account for “being” because our attempt to account for it, would change it, and this dual dance between observer and observee would continue indefinitely. There were many philosophers in this era that were struggling with these sort of existential conundrums in this era, which includes things like Russell’s antinomy.
However, for those who have read some previous layman work on quantum mechanics (QM) before (or who have practiced it scholastically), they should see an immediate connection between this notion and something like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principles, pioneered 15 - 16 years after Bohr’s initial work. More broadly, the challenge of “what is a measurement”, which is intimately related to the observer/observee conundrum has never fully been resolved within QM, and is actively debated even today. Bohr imbibed these notions deeply during his young adulthood, in his masters degree training, and seemed to have viewed models more as utility, approximations. As stated, this notion is extremely modern, and has only gained more wide acceptance during the era of cheap computing.
Hebron does us a great service by accounting the step-wise choices Bohr makes in tackling this “oven problem” (and the extension challenges derived from it) for much of chapter 2 & 3. What’s great also is that besides some facility with algebraic manipulation (in the classical sense), and some knowledge of trigonometric facts, much of this material is digestible to the general reader. The only apparatus that is probably harder to grasp are Bohr’s paper-and-compass constructions of orbits. Unfortunately, much of these geometric skills have been lost to most primary/secondary school students (and even college level mathematics students may need significant tutoring to get up to speed).
Still, from the basic “principle of equipartition of energy”, Bohr leverages what looks like a “particle in the box” construct, to show why “jumps” are needed between various wave-modes, because otherwise energy (and thus heat) would concentrate on the higher wavelength modes, which is inconsistent with the data. This first “break” between a theory that predicates “continuous” or smooth observable mechanism, and one that exhibits discontinuity are the initial steps towards what would become QM. But what’s so exhilarating is that we see the motivations for these (and his subsequent) steps, and more often than not, it is not recondite to the average thinker.
Bohr believes in one thing, then someone tells him about a ‘bridge’ to his problem, say Balmer’s function, he uses it, then he changes his mind. So goes this process, step-by-step, and we as the reader really feel like we are discovering this process with Bohr. It was very exciting. What’s most interesting to read is how with each step he slowly jettisons the classical mechanics. He first constructs the atomic model geometrically, in the way that stellar bodies are arrayed larger stellar bodies and are bound to it via gravity. We see intricate calculations/constructions in the planar geometry. However, he realizes after trying to fudge his model with facts, via what few “free parameters” available to him, that he cannot achieve the result. So what does he do? He removes those assumptions, but he does not totally expunge them from his mind, even the matured first model of the atom uses the “mental gimmick” of mechanics to facilitate understanding in the mind, but he knows this is purely a trick. Bohr will eventually state that although his theory was motivated/intuited from classical mechanics, it has no relation to it. But this is mysterious, how could one extract meaningful truth from false analogs? This ends up becoming philosophical very quickly, and we see the beginnings of Bohr's famous “correspondence principles” within this thread of thinking.
It is interesting to note, despite what became known as the “shut up and calculate” school of thought from QM, that Bohr, and the first generation of quantum physicists it obviously were very philosophic people, and we should not expect anything different, as with the start of any theory, all you have in the beginning of any theory, are the basic facts, mathematics, and your wits, so the fact that Bohr was influenced by philosophy and meta-physics himself should not surprise anyone, and it should point the way for future researchers to not shy away from “softer” approaches/thoughts on their subject matters.
Lastly, I”ll say that this is the first time in any of the books I’ve read in the past few years, that I’ve gotten this feeling. More often than not, a textbook treatment of a formalism will approach the material fully formed. The unfortunate problem with this approach is the student often gets no understanding of how that thing was derived. They may get some stylized examples of how one *may* derive certain statements in the formalism, but because the formalism has the advantage of being fully-formed, often times these derivations have an air unachievable elegance to the common student, like a boy pining after a movie star, it is pure fantasy, and not within the grasp of the adolescence. Yet, these people are just humans. Bohr was just a human (even Einstein). So reading (and more importantly working through) the analytic struggles, and intermediary thoughts they had whilst developing their work is very critical to the maturity of the mind, and this book achieves just this (if only for a moment). My only complaint is it’s barely 120 pages long, and I could read something 3 or 4 times this length from this author (or this series).
Overall, I highly recommend this book. Thus far, I’ve not been disappointed by the “Oxford Shorts”, they are indeed short, but they pack enough functional information that is worth the value and time spent going through them.
April 7, 2022
the whole copenhagen circle is a bit of an obsession to me. perhaps even to a point that i had a bit of a blind spot regarding their mistakes and bad approaches to the (still ongoing) quantum mechanics interpretation. i still admire bohr and find him absolutely fascinating.
i found that the book worked the best for me when limited to a couple pages a day. it has a lot of good points and interesting details, but some chapters in the middle are...well.. a bit pretentiously written. i also expected more information about bohr's life, so, a four-star it is.
i found that the book worked the best for me when limited to a couple pages a day. it has a lot of good points and interesting details, but some chapters in the middle are...well.. a bit pretentiously written. i also expected more information about bohr's life, so, a four-star it is.
December 17, 2024
There are many books out there on quantum physics for a lay reader, and I’ve read a few (including Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory, George Gamow, 1966; The Hidden Reality, Brian Greene, 2011; How the Hippies Saved Physics, David Kaiser, 2011; QED: the Strange Theory of Light and Matter, Richard Feynman, 1985) and I think this is by far the best and most comprehensive regarding the development of quantum physics. Bohr is a revered scientist of the 20th century, and for many, up there in the firmament with the likes of Einstein and Feynman. He was the leader of the cabal that came up with quantum mechanics. His story is his science and so this is the story of the development of quantum theory and its transition to quantum mechanics. It certainly supersedes Gamow's book, which perhaps was written too much from memory and a little bias (in retrospect). The author is a UC Berkely history of science professor, and has obviously took a deep dive into studying the flurry of physics occurring that is relevant to the development of quantum theory/quantum mechanics. There is a fair amount of math in the book, as there should be, but skipping through the math, as I often did, will still give you a solid appreciation for the complexities of what finally became our current model of the atom, the quantum mechanical atom. “A Very Short Introduction” is misleading. It is short but pithy and accessibly packed.
September 11, 2024
The decision, to explain Bohr's work from the aftermath of Einstein's 1904 paper through the study of hydrogen atom, spectroscopy, the development of the Copenhagen Institute, through his student Heisenberg's matrix quantum and the disputes -- w/ Shrödinger & others -- of 1926 & 1927, without context, in symbolic formulae, to demonstrate Bohr's urgent complementarity, is justifiable, though it makes the reading heavy-going. Bohr's books, his wide literacy, his extroversion, his fabulous envisioning of a world science council, his archive, all that is mostly left for the last two chapters of this 120 pp. monograph. Heilbron fails to bring the ideas alive but what he doesn't do is allow Bohr's work to be overdetermined by its post-August 1945 ratiocinations. I can see where readers might be pleased about that.
October 1, 2024
One of the worse Very Short Introductions I've "read" - maybe the math works better on paper, but for an audiobook the equations can be rough. The writing style wasn't very engaging. Felt overly sympathetic towards Denmark during the Nazi occupation.
March 5, 2021
Great little book on aspects of Niels Bohr that are new to me, but I am listening, and the book has many equations, which are read aloud. I was not able to keep up. Still, highly recommended.
September 9, 2021
So if you know nothing about Niels Bohr this is not your book! To sum it up briefly, it was an ode to Niels Bohr and Denmark. The book is really not suited to the audiobook format ...
July 13, 2023
3.4 stars.
It was ok. There were some things in there I hadn't heard before. It was a bit scattered though. My esteem for Bohr continues to grow.
It was ok. There were some things in there I hadn't heard before. It was a bit scattered though. My esteem for Bohr continues to grow.
October 1, 2023
This book will tell you a bit less than the Wikipedia page on Bohr, so for me it was a loss of time.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews