Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [38]
His father's academic position and his mother's social standing ensured that many of Denmark's leading scientists and scholars, writers and artists were regular visitors to the Bohr home. Three such guests were, like Bohr senior, members of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters: the physicist Christian Christiansen, the philosopher Harald Høffding and the linguist Vilhelm Thomsen. After the Academy's weekly meeting, the discussion would continue at the home of one of the quartet. In their teens, whenever their father played host to his fellow Academicians, Niels and Harald were allowed to eavesdrop on the animated debates that took place. It was a rare opportunity to listen to the intellectual concerns of a group of such men as the mood of fin-de-siècle gripped Europe. They left on the boys, as Niels said later, 'some of our earliest and deepest impressions'.4
Bohr the schoolboy excelled at mathematics and science, but had little aptitude for languages. 'In those days,' recalled a friend, 'he was definitely not afraid to use his strength when it came to blows during the break between classes.'5 By the time he enrolled at Copenhagen University, then Denmark's only university, to study physics in 1903, Einstein had spent more than a year at the Patent Office in Bern.6 When he received his Master's degree in 1909, Einstein was extraordinary professor of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich and had received his first nomination for the Nobel Prize. Bohr had also distinguished himself, albeit on a far smaller stage. In 1907, aged 21, he won the Gold Medal of the Royal Danish Academy with a paper on the surface tension of water. It was the reason why his father, who had won the silver medal in 1885, often proudly proclaimed, 'I'm silver but Niels is gold'.7
Bohr struck gold after his father persuaded him to abandon the laboratory for a place in the countryside to finish writing his award-winning paper. Although he submitted it just hours before the deadline, Bohr still found something to add, and handed in a postscript two days later. The need to rework any piece of writing until he was satisfied that it conveyed exactly what he wanted verged on an obsession. A year before he finished his doctoral thesis, Bohr admitted that he had already written 'fourteen more or less divergent rough drafts'.8 Even the simple act of penning a letter became a protracted affair. One day Harald, seeing a letter lying on Niels' desk, offered to post it, only to be told: 'Oh no, that is just one of the first drafts for a rough copy.'9
All their lives, the brothers remained the closest of friends. Apart from mathematics and physics they shared a passion for sport, particularly football. Harald, the better player, won a silver medal at the 1908 Olympics as a member of the Danish football team that lost to England in the final. Also regarded by many to be intellectually more gifted, he gained a doctorate in mathematics a year before Niels received his in physics in May 1911. Their father, however, always maintained that his eldest son was 'the special one in the family'.10
Dressed in white tie and tails as custom demanded, Bohr began the public defence of his doctoral thesis. It lasted just 90 minutes, the shortest on record. One of the two examiners was his father's friend Christian Christiansen. He regretted that no Danish physicist 'was well enough informed about the theory of metals to be able to judge a dissertation on the subject'.11