Niels Bohr Archive

Så blev det 7. oktober og Niels Bohrs fødselsdag. Han blev født i 1885, og det er tradition, at vi på denne dato samles udenfor Blegdamsvej 17 og stiller op til det årlige Institutfoto.

Kvinder i Fysik and the Niels Bohr Archive proudly present a 2-day conference focusing on the role of women in the history of Niels Bohr Institutet!

Everyone is welcome to join. Sign up for the conference here:
https://indico.nbi.ku.dk/event/2082/registrations/1066/

Registration deadline is November 1, 2024.

The full program can be viewed here:
https://indico.nbi.ku.dk/event/2082/timetable/

Day 1 primarily features talks on historical women in the earliest days of the Insitute. The talks will cover scientists as well as important administrative staff and family members.

Day 2 primarily features research and career talks by physicists connected to the Institute.

The keynote presentation will be given by Anthea Coster from MIT Haystack Observatory about the life and reseach of Lise Meitner. This public event will take place at the Lundbeckfond Auditorium at Copenhagen Biocenter, Ole Maaløes Vej 5, 2200 Copenhagen N, on November 12 at 17:30-19:00 and does not require registration.

We have an amazing lineup of confirmed speakers:
⭐Anthea Coster, MIT Haystack Observatory
⭐Liselotte Højgaard, Rigshospitalet
⭐Christian Joas, Niels Bohr Archive
⭐Namiko Mitarai, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen
⭐Lene B. Oddershede, Novo Nordisk Foundation
⭐Sarah Pearson, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen
⭐Bente Rosenbeck, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, Københavns Universitet - University of Copenhagen
⭐Anja Skaar Jacobsen, Københavns VUC (KVUC) and Department of Science Education, UCPH
⭐Rob Sunderland, Niels Bohr Archive
⭐Irene Tamborra, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen
⭐Elisabeth Therese Ulrikkeholm, FOSS

The conference will conclude with a panel discussion on day 2, and the panelists are:
⭐Anja C. Andersen, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen
⭐Hanne Andersen, Department of Science Education, UCPH
⭐Anthea Coster, MIT Haystack Observatory
⭐Joachim Mathiesen, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen
⭐Birgitta Nordström, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen

Check our website for more information:
https://kvinderifysik.dk/2024/06/04/women-of-nbi/

The eminent historian of science John Heilbron (1934–2023) passed away in Padua, Italy, on Sunday morning, November 5, 2023, at the age of 89. We were blessed to have him here at the Niels Bohr Archive many times, last in August of this year for our centennial conference (see photograph). He was a close friend of the Niels Bohr Archive and has been instrumental as an advisor, user, and constructive critic since well before its inception in 1985. He will be greatly missed. Our thoughts are with John's wife Alison at this time of loss.

Den danske fysiker Niels Bohr var til stede i Los Alamos da Robert Oppenheimer og hans enorme hold af forskere skabte verdens første atombombe. Men hvilken rolle spillede Bohr under, og ikke mindst efter, udviklingen af bomben? Historiker og leder af Niels Bohr Arkivet Christian Joas fortæller

NBA History of Science Seminar: Dania Achermann
“Glaciers as calendars: The practical and epistemic consequences of a concept in the twentieth century”

Time: 10 February 2020, 14:15
Place: Auditorium A, Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen

Today’s knowledge about global climate change heavily depends on the results of ice core research. However, until the mid-twentieth century, the study of glacial ice and the study of climate had little in common. How has the idea of glaciers as a climate archive evolved? And what were the consequences for both ice and climate research?
In the 1950s, Danish physicist Willi Dansgaard developed a method to identify the temperature of the atmosphere in precipitation. Hence, he concluded, it would also be possible to reconstruct the temperature of the past by studying old precipitation: glacial ice. At the same time, Swiss nuclear physicist Hans Oeschger developed a new radiation counter that enabled him to study the content of the air trapped in the tiny ice bubbles. Glaciological expeditions subsequently set out to find the oldest ice. By drilling deep into Polar glaciers and using their depth as an archive of Earth’s deep climate history, they began to reconstruct past climates layer by layer back in time. The proxy data retrieved from glaciers contributed crucially to a temporal and spatial expansion of climate history far beyond human time scales. However, the ice of interest was hidden deep down in ancient glaciers and hence hardly accessibly. Having access to an ice core was therefore scientific capital. Due to its inaccessibility and the high expenses of drilling expeditions, ice coring influenced the glaciological practice as well as the international and interdisciplinary cooperation. This presentation will investigate these consequences for the glaciological research practice as well as for the climate theories.

Dania Achermann is Senior Researcher at the research group “Environmental and Climate History” at the University of Bern (Switzerland) and PI of the project "Ice Cores, Small States and Global Climate Change: The rise of a new scientific discipline" funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. For this project she is taking leave of absence from her position as Assistant Professor for History of Science and Technology at the University of Wuppertal (Germany). Her main field of interest is the history of atmospheric and climate sciences in the 20th century, history of ice and snow research, environmental history and environmental humanities.

NBA History of Science Seminar
Thiago Hartz, “Unitarity, ghosts, and the role of mathematics: A history of quantum gravity from 1950 to 1967”

Time: 2 December 2019, 11:15
Place: Auditorium A, Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen
Organizer: Niels Bohr Archive

In the late 1940s, when renormalization methods were successfully applied in quantum electrodynamics, the community of quantum field theorists split into two groups. One group wanted to find a more solid ground for the theory, while the other group began to apply those new methods to other interactions, e.g., the nuclear and the gravitational ones. The latter group expected that these interactions could be handled with similar methods, however in the 1950s and 1960s such an expectation was frustrated. The gravitational field was particularly problematic, since it led to a non-unitary S-matrix, as Richard Feynman discovered in 1962.
In this talk I will present a history of some quantum theories of the gravitational field from 1950 to 1967, emphasizing in particular the works of the American physicists Richard Feynman (1918–1988) and Bryce DeWitt (1923–2004) and the Soviet physicists Ludwig Faddeev (1934–2017) and Victor Popov (1937–1994). I will explain their research projects and their main results—in particular the discovery, due to these four physicists, that, in order to restore the S-matrix unitarity, one must incorporate in the theory a new field, which is nowadays known as the Faddeev-Popov ghost. I will conclude with an epistemological reflection about the strategies for theory selection and about the role of mathematics in physics.

Thiago Hartz (born 1986) is Assistant Professor of History of Mathematics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He received his PhD in History of Science (2013) from the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, under Professor Olival Freire Jr. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Niels Bohr Archive in 2013–2015. His current research concerns the history of quantum field theory from 1930 to 1970.

NBA History of Science Seminar: Gordon Baym.

“Lev Landau, Niels Bohr, Léon Rosenfeld, and Neutron Stars in Copenhagen”

Time: 21 October 2019, 14:15
Place: Auditorium A, Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen
Organizer: Niels Bohr Archive jointly with NBIA's Astroparticle Physics Seminar

At the 1973 Solvay meeting on neutron stars, Léon Rosenfeld remarked that on the evening in February 1932 after Chadwick's letter to Bohr announcing the discovery of the neutron arrived in Copenhagen, Landau invented the idea of neutron stars. This story has become the universal founding narrative for neutron stars.
In fact, nothing Rosenfeld recounted was true—oh, the perils of oral history—and yet at the same time his recollection has proven a good guide to the actual history of Landau's involvement in astrophysics and the development of neutron stars. This seminar will trace the little known history in full, which Chris Pethick, Dima Yakolev, Pavel Haensel and I published in Physics-Uspekhi.
This seminar is jointly organized by the Niels Bohr Archive and the Astroparticle Physics Seminar at the Niels Bohr International Academy.
After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University, Gordon Baym came to Copenhagen, originally as a postdoc, and over the years has been a frequent visitor and Professor at NORDITA and an Adjunct Professor at NBI. His day job is Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is a theoretical physicist with unusually wide research interests, spanning condensed matter physics and statistical physics, including superfluidity and ultracold atomic physics, astrophysics, nuclear physics, and the history of physics. A pioneer in the study of neutron stars, and more generally the nature of the matter under extreme conditions of density and pressure, he has been a driver in studies of high-density matter in the laboratory using high-energy particle accelerators to recreate on earth, albeit briefly, the conditions in neutron stars and the early universe. He is the author of three well-known books, Quantum Statistical Mechanics (with Leo Kadanoff), Lectures on Quantum Mechanics, and Landau Fermi Liquid Theory: Concepts and Applications (with Chris Pethick). Baym has also made important contributions to the history of physics, most notably as a member of the International Project on the History of Solid-State Physics that published a monumental and authoritative book on the history of solid-state physics titled Out Of The Crystal Maze: Chapters from the History of Solid-State Physics. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; and the American Philosophical Society; and was awarded the Bethe Prize, the Onsager Prize (with Chris Pethick and Jason Ho), and the Feenberg Medal.

Graham Farmelo,
“Churchill, HG Wells and the Science of War”

Time: 11 April 2019, 15:30
Place: Auditorium A, Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen
Organizer: Niels Bohr Archive

Although Winston Churchill knew little about science, he was fascinated by the contributions it could make to the conduct of warfare. Churchill was often well ahead of his political colleagues in estimating the impact of new discoveries, notably in the long-term military potential of the discovery of nuclear fission.
In this talk, I shall argue that HG Wells was by far the most important formative influence on Churchill's thinking in this field, and that scholars have underestimated Wells's influence on the great world leader.

Graham Farmelo is a biographer and science writer, and a Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge. He studied physics at the University of Liverpool, and after his PhD became Lecturer in Physics at the Open University, and subsequently an executive at the Science Museum in London. A regular visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he is the author of The Strangest Man (London: Faber, 2008), winner of the Costa Prize for biography in 2008, and of Churchill's Bomb (London: Faber, 2013). More information about Graham Farmelo and his books and other interests can be found here: grahamfarmelo.com.