On this day, 139 years ago, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr was born. In his long and distinguished career, he made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute, which still produces cutting-edge science today. READ more… (1885)

Among three papers during the 1910s, Bohr completed the foundational understanding of the structure of the atom, namely that it’s orbited by electrons in quantized “stationary states” around the atom’s nucleus in order to stabilize it. In his 1921 paper, he showed that the chemical properties of each element were largely determined by the number of e

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