Customer Reviews

Niels Bohr's Times, In Physics, Philosophy, and Polity

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I really wanted to like this book. I really wanted to be able to give it five stars. But I can't. While there is much to be admired here, this is definitely not the definitive biography of Niels Bohr.

As a previous reviewer hinted, the problem with this book is that it contains far too much quantum physics and not enough Niels Bohr. I am a former high school Physics teacher, and even I had trouble keeping up.

To be sure, there are moments of keen insight. I especially enjoyed reading about Bohr's relationships with his family and with his colleagues. Unfortunately, every time Pais would get me interested in something like that, he would then quickly bring the book to a screeching hault by going back to detail the history of some finer concept of quantum physics.

If you want to read a history of quantum physics with an emphasis on the contributions made by Niels Bohr, then this is the book for you. If, however, you simply want to learn about Niels Bohr the man, you may want to keep shopping.

I enjoyed this book. I think the book may even be the definitive account of Bohr's life. My big complaint about this book, though, is as follows: the book is not good for an everyday person who wants to know about Bohr. It goes very heavy (in my mind, too heavy) into physics developments of the twentieth century. Combined with the fact that Pais is not that great at explaining these concepts, you have to have a good background in science to enjoy this book. All told, though, I thought Pais did a good job at showing the reader a glimpse of Bohr's world. Highly recommended for science types.

I bought this book for my Dad and he loved it ..... BUT he's a retired scientist with an interest in and basic knowledge of quantum mechanics. He particularly enjoyed the explanations of this very weird branch of physics. As an example of the type of reader who may enjoy this - he's the only person I know who has read "A Brief History of Time" cover to cover.

Online Review
This book is set up perfectly. It includes chapters that are not about Niels Bohr, but on other scientists of the time, which helps understand more in depth of Bohr's studies. It is a very easy book to read where each chapter is broken up into subchapters that makes it even easier to read. Although it was a fairly straight forward book, it got very boring at times. This book may get very confusing at times because it does not only talk about Bohr, but also talks in depth of many other scientists that also worked with quantum physics.
Abraham Pais did a great job of portraying Niels Bohr not only as a great scientist, but also as a great man. He goes about to explain in depth Bohr's family, how many scientists influenced his work, and the kinds of experiments and studies that he did. By reading this book, we can tell that Abraham Pais has a science background as well because of his ability to explain the experiments of Bohr and other scientists in great detail. With his background, Pais was able to write a book that glorified not on Niels Bohr, but also the entirety of physics.

Captivating biography! One of the best. In a class by itself!
Written before the popular Broadway play, "Copenhagen" by Michael Frayn, Pais' book covers the Heisenberg-Bohr meeting in 1941[the real one],--- and there is a lot more! We are fortunate that Pais has given us this, and several other wonderful biographies;-- the one about Albert Einstein stands out! It is especially fortunate that he has chosen to write for the general public. I can't think of anyone who did, or possibly could have done it better. His writing is captivating, and unique in its recreation of the times, and the social context of the scientific events. Pais further succeeds magnificently in bringing to life the many colorful personalities. This includes the young physicists born in Europe around 1900 who arrived in Copenhagen in the 1920ties to work with Bohr, some later to win the Nobel Prize,-- how he became a father figure to some of them,- Heisenberg, for example. And there are the other players,

Albert Einstein early on, and Pais himself later, in the drama of quantum physics of the Twentieth Century. Even if you might perhaps not be scientifically inclined, and if you choose to skip the physics sections, I don't think you will be disappointed.

Anyone who knows Pais' Subtle is the Lord (Einstein biography) - which, to my shock is listed as 'out of stock' - will certainly appreciate this Bohr biography. Bohr was a towering figure in the physics of the first half of the 20th century, and Pais covers it all - physics, politics, personal life, philosophy, and everything else. Again, to have somebody as highly qualified as Pais write scientific biographies is a pure pleasure.

Historical description of the development of nuclear and quantum physics, especially from the viewpoint of Bohr and colleagues, many who Pais worked with. Provides a non-technical description of many of the principles of modern physics.

Abraham Pais's biography of Bohr, NIELS BOHR'S TIMES, IN PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY, AND POLITY, isn't really about rock 'n' roll, and you can't find anything about Aimee Mann in the index, but anyone who has a sense of the multiplicity rampant in modernity ought to want to sit these people down for a good listen to the `It's Not Safe' song at the end of the `I'm with Stupid' (1995) CD by Aimee Mann. The CD liner notes has the words of the songs in alphabetical order, but Aimee Mann is loved as a songwriter well enough to have the lyrics and chords posted on the internet, with six chords for the first line, making it easy to verify that one of the three words between from and fun on the alphabetical list is used to describe the kind of "freak in this world in which everybody's willing to choose swine over pearls":

And maybe everything is all for nothing
Still you'd better keep it to yourself
'Cause God knows it's not safe with anybody else.

Those political planners who expected World War II to make the world into a safer place might not be ready to accept that `small' would be the idea most closely associated with any country which was conquered by Germany, and Denmark was occupied by the Germans in 1940. Just a few months after the war ended in 1945, "In a lecture to the Danish Engineering Society Bohr said that plutonium can be produced at the rate of 1 kilogram per day, causing allegations that he was giving away atomic secrets. This led him to send a clarification to the press stating that he did not know technical details about the production of active materials." (p. 511). Chapter 21, Bohr, pioneer of `glasnost,' shows the interaction of a scientist who wanted information to be shared openly with a political system that functioned on secret circus stunt principles. Only those with a need to know how the new stunt would be performed would ever be given enough information to use; small nations were expected to be purely spectators.

There are a few elements of philosophy in this book, most generally considered in Chapter 19, `We are suspended in language.' Small atoms hydrogen and helium played a large part in developing the old quantum theory in 1913-1916. Bohr was recognized early in his career, receiving the Nobel Prize for physics on November 9, 1922, when Albert Einstein was given the prize for 1921 a year late. (p. 211). Einstein is the heading for a column of topics in the subject index, and Chapter 11, Bohr and Einstein, reveals, "Music was a profound necessity in Einstein's life, not in Bohr's." (p. 225).

The second verse of `It's Not Safe' is a fair description of the themes of a biography:

You can take your own advice and try again
But a thousand compromises don't add up to a win
And they'd be happy if you'd only cover your tracks
But the trail of crumbs you've left won't help you find your way back

Physicists might talk about particles, but on a very small scale, things that are too tiny to see might be something else entirely, energy in the form of a wave, a matrix of mathematical values, or as ephemeral as the probability of a particle being at a particular place and time. Bohr won attention early in his career by being able to correlate the spectral lines for light given off by hydrogen (with four frequencies measured in 1859 and 1860, p. 141) with the energy levels of the single electron in the hydrogen atom. Bohr learned the Balmer formula for calculating the frequencies in February, 1913, and Bohr wrote a paper by March 6, 1913 which he sent to Rutherford for publication. There are calculations on pages 147-148 for energy states, the orbital angular momentum on page 150, magnetic moment on page 151, and "The insistence on the role of the outermost ring of electrons as the seat of most chemical properties of the elements, in particular their valencies, constitutes the first step toward quantum chemistry." (p. 152). In 1915, Bohr proved that ultraviolet light emitted by mercury vapor when the energy of an electron exceeded 4.9 eV gave "the first direct experimental proof of the Bohr relation!" (p. 184).

The idea of quantum mechanical probability was introduced by a paper by Max Born on June 25, 1926. (p. 286). Science may become more like opinion polling in the future, but Niels Bohr clung to the idea that physics still needed to be about measuring quantities which could be related to the laws of classical physics. Students attempting to confront new problems they faced in breaking atoms down into smaller particles came up with probability distributions of the electron in hydrogen like Fig. 9 on page 307, except that a footnote explains, "the size of the atom for n = 10 is actually about 100 times larger than for n = 1." All the extra space required for high energy levels only gets measured in secondary effects. "Heisenberg remembered how `Bohr emphasized the complementarity between temperature and energy to the extreme'." (p. 437). What we see is ordinary properties, but Bohr had to account for such by tracing the "matter back to the behaviour of assemblies of immense numbers of atoms." (p. 437). Maybe modern political thinking, as reflected in the ability to devise opinion polls which tell politicians whatever they want to hear, is closer to this notion of complementarity of diverse elements than our typically academic study of the classical political thinking of Plato about the good, or of Machiavelli's writings about the powerful direction of mass thinking by some all-conquering big lie. But Aimee Mann can sing like hell:

You can play along, but you'll just end up wrong somehow, won't you?

This man nos nuttiing bout scince i tink he shdntld rlease ne mre boks in da futr