Denmark's most amazing goalkeeper: Thinking about mathematics while playing football, winning the Nobel Prize at the age of 37, quarreling with Einstein all his life, and creating quantum mechanics

Yige Yang Jingfa from Aofei Temple
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He missed a great save because of a math problem.

Since then, there has been one less goalkeeper Bohr and one more scientist Bohr in the world.

He is Bohr, the founder of quantum mechanics as we know him . He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his research on atomic structure and quantum theory, and became world-famous. He was regarded as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century.

The Copenhagen School he founded gave birth to nearly ten Nobel Prize winners such as Heisenberg, Dirac, and Pauli.

But what most people don’t know is that he started playing football at the age of 14 and once became the main goalkeeper of AB, one of the strongest clubs in the country at the time.

During a game, because he was doing math problems on the goal post, he forgot to block the German club's goal. Afterward, he admitted: Doing the questions was more interesting than guarding the goal.

People familiar with the matter recalled that this was one of the reasons why he did not enter international competitions.

To solve math problems and miss the save

In fact, Bohr was born in a family with both scientific and sports culture. His father, Christian Bohr, is a professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen. At the same time, he is very fond of sports.

Football was still a new thing in Denmark at the time. Not only did his father help introduce the sport to Copenhagen, he also built a football field in the nearby Tagansvij street. Every time I went to play football, I would take Bohr and his brother with me.

Football is also part of their curriculum at school. According to the memories of his classmates at the time, every time Bohr played football, he would hit the ball hard and hit it into the ditch.

It was precisely because of this that the teacher discovered his talent as a goalkeeper .

△ Bohr, fourth from left in the second row, source: Niels Bohr archives

When he was still fourteen or fifteen years old (1899) , he and his brother were selected into the junior department of AB Club (Akademisk Boldklub) , and then entered the first echelon, and became the main player of the club within one year.

AB Club was once one of the most successful clubs in Danish football, winning the Danish football championship nine times. Bohr's father was a director of the club.

He originally thought that he would go further and further in football step by step, but there was an episode in the middle. According to insiders' later memories, this was one of the reasons why he later said goodbye to football.

In the match against Germany's Mittweida Tecnicum, because the ball rarely fell towards AB's goal, Bohr simply leaned on one of the goal posts to solve math problems.

As a result, when the opponent made a long shot, Bohr was caught off guard and lost a point.

After the game, he admitted to his teammates that the issues he was thinking about were more interesting than the game, so he quit the sport after the 1905 season.

In comparison, his brother Harald Bohr, who was two years younger than him, was much more talented and went further in his football career.

At the age of 16, Harald Bohr made his debut in the first echelon of AB and was known as "the first dribbler in Danish football". Before a game, he would always hold a white handkerchief in the air to measure the direction and strength of the wind.

He later joined the national team as captain and participated in four international competitions, including the 1908 London Olympics, where he won a silver medal and scored twice in the final.

△ The Danish football team in the 1908 Olympic Games, Harald Bohr in the top row, second from left

But it wasn't long before he also chose to continue his studies and specialize in mathematics, which also gave rise to the theorem named after him-the Bohr-Mollerup theorem.

At that time, many people confused the two people. There are even rumors that when Bohr, then a professor at the University of Copenhagen, met with the King of Denmark, the King immediately called him a famous football player. As a result, Bohr quickly denied it three times: You are talking about my brother .

△ The Bohr brothers, source: Niels Bohr archives

In an era of amateur football, when most players had day jobs, it was rare to find someone as intelligent and athletic as the Bohr brothers, which is why they were so popular in the country.

Putting football aside, when the Bohr brothers were young, the younger brother was actually better than his older brother, and even helped him revise his doctoral thesis in physics.

You must know that they are two years apart, but they entered the University of Copenhagen at the same time, and the younger brother got a master's degree earlier than the older brother and completed his PhD in one year.

Compared with his less accomplished younger brother, Bohr seemed "slow" and only made a slight splash in college.

This may also be related to his personality. He is not very good at talking and is introverted; while his younger brother is more eloquent and popular with his classmates.

The turning point of all this started when he met his Bole Rutherford .

Founder of the Copenhagen School

Bohr studied from undergraduate to doctoral studies at the University of Copenhagen. At that time, his doctoral thesis "Electronic Theory of Metals" was already a breakthrough. However, because it was written in Danish, it did not receive much attention outside Northern Europe.

So he came to England, hoping to be appreciated by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Thomson .

However, he was too straightforward and put two papers in front of the professor without saying anything. One was his own, hoping to get his guidance, and the other was Thomson's, hoping to point out his mistakes in person.

This...first impression will not be good for anyone.

As a result, Thomson's former student Rutherford happened to come to Cambridge to give a report, so Thomson took advantage of the situation and introduced Bohr to Rutherford.

Rutherford , the father of nuclear physics, created the Rutherford model, which successfully proved that there is a nucleus at the center of the atom.

△ Rutherford

It is precisely because of this opportunity that they have developed a close relationship as both teachers and friends for many years.

Based on Rutherford's research, Bohr constructed a breakthrough Bohr model by citing the quantum theory proposed by Max Planck .

In this epoch-making long paper - " On the Structure of Atoms and Molecules" , Bohr proposed quantum discontinuity and successfully explained the structure and properties of hydrogen atoms and hydrogen-like atoms.

The Bohr model introduced the concept of quantization for the first time to study the movement of electrons within atoms, successfully elucidated the mechanism of atomic light emission, and can be said to have opened the door to the microscopic world.

This achievement is also hailed as an important turning point or milestone in the development of modern atomic structure theory, and Bohr himself was awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for this.

After that, Bohr, who became famous in the First World War, was successively hired as a lecturer and professor by Victoria University, University of Copenhagen and other institutions, and was elected as a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences in 1917.

The Copenhagen Institute of Theoretical Physics (the Bohr Institute), which he devoted himself to building , was officially established in 1920 and soon attracted a number of physicists such as Heisenberg, Pauli, Landau, Zhou Peiyuan, and Hervesch. defect.

Many of them were later quantum mechanics masters, and together they solved many of the most profound problems in physics. This was what became the "Copenhagen School".

Until now, this place is still the temple in the hearts of many physics workers.

Falling in love with Einstein

Bohr's theory was not without its doubts, which must be mentioned in his decades-long "tit-for-tat" confrontation with Einstein.

Unlike Bohr, Einstein firmly believed that " God does not play dice ".

He believes that there must be a higher deterministic theory, quantum mechanics is only an approximation of this theory, and the inherent randomness of quantum mechanics is just a misunderstanding caused by our lack of understanding of this theory.

For this reason, Einstein, Schrödinger and others proposed the concept of quantum entanglement, trying to use this strange quantum state of quantum entanglement to demonstrate the incompleteness of the foundation of quantum mechanics and the absurdity of quantum randomness.

The Copenhagen School, headed by Bohr, defends quantum randomness and believes that the foundation of quantum mechanics is complete.

The two schools of thought have been arguing for 30 years.

At the Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927 and the Sixth Solvay Conference in 1930, attended by many big names in the physics world, the two had face-to-face ideological collisions.

△ A group photo of participants of the 5th Solvay Conference, with Bohr on the far right in the middle row

According to Heisenberg's later recollection, during the Solvay Conference, Einstein often told Bohr and others about the new thought experiments he had come up with during the night during breakfast.

Bohr turned on the "goalkeeper" defense mode and immediately began to analyze. On the way to the conference room, he made a preliminary explanation of the issue and discussed it in detail at the meeting.

The result was always during dinner, Bohr could prove to Einstein that his experiment could not refute the uncertainty relationship.

Einstein would propose a new thought experiment the next day, more complex than the previous one.

The cycle goes on like this, and no one is convinced.

△ Bohr and Einstein

After that, the two also started an exchange of papers, taking the debate to a new level.

In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen jointly published an article in Physical Review Letters titled "Can Quantum Mechanics Be Considered a Complete Description of Physical Reality?" 》 (Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete, referred to as EPR) paper.

In their paper, they proposed a necessary condition for theoretical completeness: every element of physical reality must have its counterpart in a physical theory. That is, without disturbing a physical system, we can predict the value of a physical quantity with certainty. A thought experiment was also proposed, known historically as the "EPR Paradox".

Five months later, in response, Bohr wrote a paper with the same name and published it in the same magazine as a defense.

He used the inseparability of measuring instruments and object reality as the reason to deny the premise of the EPR argument - the epistemological criterion of physical reality, thus denying the paradoxical nature of the EPR experiment.

However, just as the EPR argument was not accepted by Bohr, Bohr's rebuttal was also unconvincing to Einstein.

Since then, the dispute between the two has continued.

△ From left to right: Bohr, James Frank, Einstein, Isidore Rabbi

Until 1962, the day before Bohr's death, he drew a sketch of Einstein's light box experiment on the blackboard and explained it to the interviewers who came. This picture also became Bohr's legacy. The last handwriting.

And this debate, which lasted for more than ten years, has gradually become a good story in the history of science.

Science historian Max Yamer once commented that this was a great debate in the history of physics, perhaps comparable only to the Newton-Leibniz debate in the early 18th century.

One More Thing

It is worth mentioning that Bohr’s children seem to have inherited Bohr’s physical and athletic talents.

His fourth son, Ogg, inherited Bohr's mantle to study physics and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975, becoming one of the four father-son pairs to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.

△ Ogg

The other son, Ernes, is a lawyer and represented Denmark in the field hockey competition at the 1948 London Olympics, fulfilling his father's unfulfilled Olympic dream.

Reference links:
[1]https://olympics.com/en/athletes/harald-august-bohr
[2]https://www.vavel.com/en/international-football/2018/02/19/881983- the-bohr-brothers-how-niels-and-harald-became-footballs-scholarly-siblings.html
[3]http://zhishifenzi.com/depth/character/7662.html
[4]https://www. nbarchive.dk/collections/photocollection/
[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademisk_Boldklub
[6] https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E5%B0%BC%E5% B0%94%E6%96%AF%C2%B7%E7%8E%BB%E5%B0%94