Family of Science

The Bohr Family

Niels Bohr was a great practitioner of the Scientific method and inspired many physicists throughout his career such as Werner Heisenberg, Lev Landau, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, just to name a few and undoubtedly continues to do so.

But his motivations and influential contributions are resonated in his own family as well. This image that I came across a few days ago, tugged at my conscience and made me realize something truly extraordinary.

Here we see Neils Bohr (extreme left), Danish theoretical physicist, who proposed the idea of electron shells and quantized energy levels that led to the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics, along with his son Aage Bohr (middle) who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the modified Liquid Drop Model to explain Nuclear deformations. From 1946, both father and son worked together at the Neils Bohr Institute (NBI), University of Copenhagen.

And of course, we cannot forget little Tomas Bohr, Niels Bohr’s grandson (bottom) who is currently Professor of Physics at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), working in the area of fluid dynamics, whose work recently helped disprove a report that a macroscopic fluid dynamic system can exhibit quantum-like behavior. He is one of the leading researchers in his field and a great example for young physicists.

But not all members of the Bohr family are scientists. Science is truly fostered in communities and societies that promote discussion on interesting topics and compelling ideas to push the envelope of discovery. The Bohr family is a great example of this sentiment, but for me what this image signifies is that it is not the Family of Bohr, instead, it is the symbol of the Family of Science, and all Scientists, throughout the world, are a part of this family; a family that is built on the foundations of the discoveries of Generation of Niels Bohr, Maxwell, Rutherford, Faraday, etc which itself carried the field forward from its inception by Descartes, Galileo, and Newton and passed on the mantle in the capable hands of greats such as Dirac, Feynman, Saha, Bose, Bhabha, Einstein, Hawking and others…. And so continues.

This little picture above represents a much bigger picture of the evolution of the Scientific Method over the last 2 centuries and the success of the method that helped us reach the Moon and beyond and helped us uncover the secrets of the quantum nature of reality.