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Oppenheimer's hero Niels Bohr has a legacy as complicated as the "father of the atomic bomb"

 



In Christopher Nolan's hit biopic "Oppenheimer," real-life Danish physicist Niels Bohr is more than just a major character. As depicted by Shakespearean actor Kenneth Branagh, he is a living legend, looming large both over the film's depiction of the Manhattan Project and over the psyche of the titular protagonist himself, J. Robert Oppenheimer. The film even includes a controversial scene in which Oppenheimer tries to poison his professor after being denied the right to attend a lecture being given by Bohr.


There is a good reason why both the fictional and real Oppenheimer were so awed by Bohr. In real life, Bohr revolutionized the world of physics, and then went on to be a humanitarian as passionate and progressive as Oppenheimer himself. Then again, also like Oppenheimer, Bohr's legacy is also colored because of his involvement in the Manhattan Project — and, by extension, all of the horrors wrought by the birth of nuclear weapons.


Along with the German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg and others, Bohr developed the field of quantum mechanics (which Heisenberg founded) and constructed a popular interpretation known as the complementarity or Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bohr's interpretation remained the dominant view until the 1960s, while quantum mechanics is still taught in physics classes — and was instrumental to the creation of nuclear physics.


"Through his physics, Bohr fundamentally changed our view of the world we live in," Dr. Christian Joas, Director of the Niels Bohr Archive at the University of Copenhagen, told Salon by email. "The genesis of quantum mechanics in the mid-1920s as the theory that now underlies almost all of physics, was a scientific revolution akin to Einstein's theory of relativity. And Einstein and Bohr together not only changed the way we look at our world, they changed the world itself, in many ways."




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