Chapter 8
I WOULD RATHER BE A COBBLER
I
n September 1923, Niels Bohr made his first visit to North America, speaking at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and elsewhere and concluding with a series of six lectures at Yale. This event The New York Times found noteworthy enough to report, though it didn’t manage to spell the speaker’s name right. “Dr. Nils Bohr,” the story ran, would explain “his theory of the structure of the atom, which has been accepted by many scientists as the most plausible hypothesis yet put forward.” A helpful subhead added: “He pictures the atom with nucleus corresponding to sun, and electrons to planets.” By this time, of course, the idea of the atom as a miniature solar system was barely tenable even as a loose analogy. At Yale, Bohr described the history of theories of the atom, explained how spectroscopy had become the essential tool for probing the
