Love, literature and the quantum atom. Niels Bohr's 1913 trilogy revisited (Q2837802)

The book consists of three parts. In the first part, Finn Aaserud illustrates that the close relationship between Niels and Margrethe Bohr, lasting a lifetime, was not only particularly harmonious but also one of the sources of Niels Bohr's revolutionary successes in physics. As the author cites from a memorial article written by Richard Courant shortly after Bohr's death, ``\dots it was not luck, rather deep insight, which led him [Niels Bohr] to find in young years his wife, who, as we all know, had such a decisive role in making his whole scientific and personal activity possible and harmonious \dots''. Courant's statement invites the author to ``a closer investigation of Bohr's `insight' with regard to the choice of his future wife, as well as a detailed study of their relationship more generally.'' This investigation is performed in connection with the broader social life of the two, in particular with their respective families, within the Danish society over the period from finding each other in Copenhagen through the time when Bohr was working in Cambridge and Manchester, until the publication of his 1913 trilogy on the constitution of atoms and molecules. A basic part of the documents the author could use were letters that Niels Bohr wrote to Margrethe during the years he spent in England. These letters, which were the author allowed to see by the Bohr family, particularly ``make it possible to follow his psychological state and gauge his thoughts through the period immediately preceding his great paper of 1913''; they show the immeasurable role Margrethe played in this creative period of his life. In the second part, John L. Heilbron presents an essay that primarily was an account of the physics problems that Bohr worked on before, during, and in the immediate sequel of his 1913 trilogy. The author states introductorily: ``The correspondence excerpted in the first part of the volume prompted a reconsideration of the account of the Bohr atom I published over fourty years ago in collaboration with the late Thomas Kuhn.'' This reconsideration shows that connections might have existed ``between the thinking behind the three-part paper of 1913 (the `trilogy') and the literary images and analogies in his well-stocked mind.'' -- The third part of the book is a reprinting of Bohr's trilogy.