Abstract
Copenhagen has been a Mecca for physicists from the whole world for several decades. Very many of them worked with Niels Bohr or close to him at different periods of time. They can and will, undoubtedly, disclose many interesting things concerning Bohr’s scientific views and his assessment of various discoveries and events, and, finally, describe him as a man. I do not, unfortunately, belong to those people who were in long enough contact with Bohr, and today this fact is an obvious obstruction for me. Nevertheless, I shall permit myself to begin with my personal impressions.
A talk given at the Niels Bohr memorial meeting held at the Polytechnic Museum, Moscow (December 12, 1962).
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References
See Usp. Fiz. Nauk, 80, 207, 1963.
N. Bohr, Proc. Phys. Soc. 78, 1083, 1961; N. Bohr, Selected Papers, Nauka, Moscow, 1970–1971.
N. Bohr, Proc. Phys. Soc. 78, 1083, 1961.
For example, in the classic book Mass Spectra and Isotopes by F. W. Aston (2nd ed., Arnold, London, 1942), the discovery of the radioactive displacement law is associated with the names of Soddy, Fajans, Russell, and Vlack, and nothing is said about the role of Bohr.
Many decades have passed since Bohr’s papers devoted to the comprehension (interpretation) of quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, great attention has been paid in recent years to attempts to reinterpret quantum mechanics and to check various experiments proposed in this connection. Furthermore, the applicability limits of quantum theory in its well-known form and the possibilities for its generalization are being discussed. However, the new approaches have typically nothing in common with the Bohm’s new interpretation’ mentioned above. At the same time, though, I would now elucidate the content of quantum mechanics in perhaps a somewhat different way than in 1962. (Author’s note to the 1995 Russian edition; see also Sect. 6 in the second chapter of Part I.)
N. Bohr, Atomnaya Fizika i Chelovecheskoe Poznanie [Atomic Physics and Human Cognition], IL, Moscow, 1961.
Besides being in the quoted collection, this paper was also published in Usp. Fiz. Nauk, 67, 37, 1959 [N. Bohr, “Quantum Physics and Philosophy”; this is a translation from the manuscript, kindly presented to V. A. Fock for publication in Usp. Fiz. Nauk. The original paper was titled “Quantum Physics and Philosophy (Causality and Complementarity)”].
See also one of Bohr’s last papers, “About the Unity of Physical Knowledge” (Usp. Fiz. Nauk 76, 21, 1962 ).
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Ginzburg, V.L. (2001). In Memory of Niels Bohr. In: The Physics of a Lifetime. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04455-1_26
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