Chapter 5
AN AUDACITY UNHEARD OF IN EARLIER TIMES
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n July 1914 Bohr took his atom on the road. With his younger brother Harald, an up-and-coming mathematician, he traveled to Germany to present his ideas in Göttingen and Munich. The University of Göttingen, squarely in the middle of the country, was a formidable center of both pure mathematics and mathematical physics. Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of the great mathematicians of all time and a noteworthy physicist, too, had taught there for many years until his death in 1855. But by the early twentieth century, Göttingen had succumbed to the stuffiness that often afflicts great institutions in the wake of a legend (think of Cambridge in the generation or two following Newton). It happened that Harald Bohr had been in Göttingen when his brother’s atomic model made its debut, and he reported back to his brother that most of the professors
