The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Bohr married, a serene marriage with a strong, intelligent and beautiful woman that lasted a lifetime. He taught at the University of Copenhagen through the autumn term. The new model of the atom he was struggling to develop continued to tax him. On November 4 he wrote Rutherford that he expected “to be able to finish the paper in a few weeks.”274 A few weeks passed; with nothing finished he arranged to be relieved of his university teaching and retreated to the country with Margrethe. The old system worked; he produced “a very long paper on all these things.”275 Then an important new idea came to him and he broke up his original long paper and began rewriting it into three parts. “On the constitution of atoms and molecules,” so proudly and bravely titled—Part I mailed to Rutherford on March 6, 1913, Parts II and III finished and published before the end of the year—would change the course of twentieth-century physics. Bohr won the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for the work.