Walking with him when he was about three years old, his father began pointing out the balanced structure of a tree—the trunk, the limbs, the branches, the twigs—assembling the tree for his son from its parts. The literal child saw the wholeness of the organism and dissented: if it wasn’t like that, he said, it wouldn’t be a tree. Bohr told that story all his life, the last time only days before he died, seventy-eight years old, in 1962.
