Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [37]
'I find the whole undertaking extremely attractive,' Einstein wrote to Walter Nernst, 'and there is little doubt in my mind that you are its heart and soul.'87 By 1910 Nernst believed that the time was ripe to get to grips with the quantum that he regarded as nothing more than a 'rule with most curious, indeed grotesque properties'.88 He convinced Solvay to finance the conference and the Belgian spared no expense booking the plush Hotel Metropole as the venue. In its luxurious surroundings, with all their needs catered for, Einstein and his colleagues spent five days talking about the quantum. Whatever slim hopes he harboured for progress at what he called 'the Witches' Sabbath', Einstein returned to Prague disappointed and complained of learning nothing that he did not know before.89
Nevertheless, he had enjoyed getting to know some of the other 'witches'. Marie Curie, whom he found to be 'unpretentious', appreciated 'the clearness of his mind, the shrewdness with which he marshalled his facts and the depth of his knowledge'.90 During the congress it was announced that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry. She had become the first scientist to win two, having already won the physics prize in 1903. It was a tremendous achievement that was overshadowed by the scandal that broke around her during the congress. The French press had learned that she was having an affair with a married French physicist. Paul Langevin, a slender man with an elegant moustache, was a delegate at the conference and the papers were full of stories that the pair had eloped. Einstein, who had seen no signs of a special relationship between the two, dismissed the reports as rubbish. Despite her 'sparkling intelligence', he thought Curie was 'not attractive enough to represent a danger to anyone'.91
Even though at times he appeared to waver under the strain, Einstein had been the first to learn to live with the quantum, and by doing so revealed a hidden element of the true nature of light. Another young theorist also learned to live with the quantum after he used it to resurrect a flawed and neglected model of the atom.
Chapter 3
THE GOLDEN DANE
Manchester, England, Wednesday, 19 June 1912. 'Dear Harald, Perhaps I have found out a little about the structure of atoms,' Niels Bohr wrote to his younger brother.1 'Don't talk about it to anybody,' he warned, 'for otherwise I couldn't write to you so soon.' Silence was essential for Bohr, as he hoped to do what every scientist dreams of: unveiling 'a little bit of reality'. There was still work to be done and he was 'eager to finish it in a hurry, and to do that I have taken off a couple of days from the laboratory (this is also a secret)'. It would take the 26-year-old Dane much longer than he thought to turn his fledgling ideas into a trilogy of papers all entitled 'On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules'. The first, published in July 1913, was truly revolutionary, as Bohr introduced the quantum directly into the atom.
It was his mother Ellen's 25th birthday when Niels Henrik David Bohr was born on 7 October 1885 in Copenhagen. She had returned to the comfort of her parents' home for the birth of her second child. Across the wide cobbled street from Christianborg Castle, the seat of the Danish parliament, Ved Stranden 14 was one of the most magnificent residences in the city. A banker and politician, her father was one of the wealthiest men in Denmark. Although the Bohrs did not stay there long, it was to be the first of the grand and elegant homes in which Niels lived throughout his life.
Christian Bohr was the distinguished professor of physiology at Copenhagen University. He had discovered the role of carbon dioxide in the release of oxygen by haemoglobin, and together with his research on respiration it led to nominations for the Nobel