Quantum_ Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality - Manjit Kumar [39]
Whereas his father had chosen Leipzig and his brother Göttingen, German universities being the traditional place for high-flying Danes to complete their education, Bohr chose Cambridge University. The intellectual home of Newton and Maxwell was for him 'the centre of physics'.12 The translated thesis would be his calling card. He hoped that it would lead to a dialogue with Sir Joseph John Thomson, the man he described later as 'the genius who showed the way for everybody'.13
After a lazy summer of sailing and hiking, Bohr arrived in England at the end of September 1911 on a one-year scholarship funded by Denmark's famous Carlsberg brewery. 'I found myself rejoicing this morning, when I stood outside a shop and by chance happened to read the address "Cambridge" over the door', he wrote to his fiancée Margrethe Nørland.14 The letters of introduction and the Bohr name led to a warm welcome from the university's physiologists who remembered his late father. They helped him find a small two-room flat on the edge of town and he was kept 'very busy with arrangements, visits and dinner parties'.15 But for Bohr it was his meeting with Thomson, J.J. to his friends and students alike, which soon preyed on his mind.
A bookseller's son from Manchester, Thomson had been elected the third head of the Cavendish Laboratory in 1884 within a week of his 28th birthday. He was an unlikely choice, after James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Rayleigh, to lead the prestigious experimental research facility, and not just because of his youth. 'J.J. was very awkward with his fingers,' one of his assistants later admitted, 'and I found it necessary not to encourage him to handle the instruments.'16 Yet if the man who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the electron lacked a delicate touch, others testified to Thomson's 'intuitive ability to comprehend the inner working of intricate apparatus without the trouble of handling it'.17
The polite manner of the slightly dishevelled Thomson, the epitome of the absent-minded professor in his round-rimmed glasses, tweed jacket and winged collar, helped calm Bohr's nerves when they first met. Eager to impress, he had walked into the professor's office clutching his thesis and a book written by Thomson. Opening the book, Bohr pointed to an equation and said, 'This is wrong.'18 Though not used to having his past mistakes paraded before him in such a forthright manner, J.J. promised to read Bohr's thesis. Placing it on top of a stack of papers on his overcrowded desk, he invited the young Dane to dinner the following Sunday.
Initially delighted, as the weeks passed and the thesis remained unread, Bohr became increasingly anxious. 'Thomson,' he wrote to Harald, 'has so far not been easy to deal with as I thought the first day.'19 Yet his admiration for the 55-year-old was undiminished: 'He is an excellent man, incredibly clever and full of imagination (you should hear one of his elementary lectures) and extremely friendly; but he is so immensely busy with so many things, and he is so absorbed in his work that it is very difficult to get to talk to him.'20 Bohr knew that his poor English did not help. So with the aid of a dictionary he began reading The Pickwick Papers as he fought to overcome the language barrier.
Early in November, Bohr went to see a former student of his father's who was now the professor of physiology at Manchester University. During the visit, Lorrain Smith introduced him to Ernest Rutherford, who had just returned from a physics conference in Brussels.21 The charismatic New Zealander, he recalled years later, 'spoke with characteristic enthusiasm about the many new prospects in physical science'.22 After being regaled