When Danish Physicist, Niels Bohr, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, Carlsberg gave Bohr a house with a beer tap directly from the brewery. That’s the kind of national pride I like.
At least that’s the popular version of the story. A sign of our times is that some people find validation in declaring a popular story to be a myth.
The actual story is somewhere in between, with the Niels Bohr Institute explaining part of it. When Niels Bohr was awarded his PhD, the Carlsberg Foundation gave him a fellowship. After being awarded the Nobel Prize, Carlsberg Brewery provided a house for Bohr to live in, which he did for the last 30 years of his life.
A pipeline direct from the brewery sounds like a good idea, but that isn’t how beer works. Instead, the brewery delivered a regular supply of bottled Carlsberg to Bohr’s house.
Carlsberg’s role in supporting and appreciating the Father of Quantum Mechanics is enough to make them the official beer of Modern Physics. There doesn’t seem to be a sanctioning body, so I’m awarding that title.
Early in the 20th Century, classical physics was upset by two epic developments proposed by two epic physicists. Relativity by Albert Einstein and quantum mechanics by Niels Bohr. Einstein was a celebrity physicist who got involved in larger issues. He signed a letter to FDR initiating work on the atomic bomb and at one point, was considered for the first prime minister of Israel. Niels Bohr remained in Denmark and acted as a wise elder or mentor to guide the development of modern physics. Niels Bohr tried to dissuade Nazi Germany’s top physicist, Werner Heisenberg, from pursuing an atom bomb.
Einstein and Bohr were two major figures in this revolution in physics, but they didn’t always agree. Einstein’s General and Special Theories of Relativity are strange and interesting, but don’t require anything “mystical” happening. Quantum Theory does. Just observing the path a photon of light takes, can change how the photon behaves.
Einstein did not receive his Nobel Prize for his theories of relativity, but for discovering that light travels as a particle he called a ‘quanta’. That led to Quantum Physics, and he wasn’t happy about that at all.
At one point, Einstein said, “I must seem like an ostrich who forever buries its head in the relativistic sand in order not to face the evil quanta.”
Quantum Physics is based on the probabilities of things happening, rather than a thing happening the same way every time.
Einstein famously said, “God does not play dice with the universe.”
Bohr responded, “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”
Niels Bohr was known for helping other physicist think through the ramifications of this new physics. At the lead up to World War II, these discussions were more critical and complicated. Hitler considered modern physics to be degenerate Jew Physics. Physicists with a Jewish heritage fled, some fled to avoid being pulled into Hitler’s war machine and some were loyal to Germany, but not to Hitler.
Heisenberg maintained that his interest was in protecting German physics, and that he deceived Hitler into thinking an atom bomb wasn’t practical. Others maintain that Heisenberg just overestimated the difficulty in producing a bomb.
Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg got on well before the war. Here they are on a mountaineering trip in the Austrian Alps in 1932, just before the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany. The movie Copenhagen [2002] is about the controversial meeting in 1941 between Bohr and Heisenberg. Heisenberg was a good looking guy, played by Daniel Craig in the movie.
Niels Bohr’s mother was of Jewish heritage, so he didn’t have Heisenberg’s ability to work with or tolerate the Nazis.
Two German physicist who won Nobel Prizes, Max Von Laue and James Franck, were going to flee Germany, but were worried about the Nazis finding their gold Nobel Prize medallions. They dropped them off with Bohr to keep them from being confiscated. Clever Bohr had the medallions dissolved in agua regia and stored on a shelf. After the war, the Nobel Committee reconstituted the medallions.
Bohr stayed in Denmark even after German occupation, but he knew his number would come up and he’d be required to work for Hitler. When the Nazis showed up at Bohr’s front door, he went out the back door while Danish resistance fighters laid down covering fire. He was smuggled to Sweden on a fishing boat, then flown out by a British De Havilland Mosquito fighter bomber. He eventually ended up in the US, helping on the Manhattan Project.
So, Carlsberg is the beer for men of physics.