would help establish our family’s credibility.
About a week later we received a letter from Mr. Page showing much interest in my situation. He said that he had contacted the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and had spoken with Niels Bohr himself. Bohr, he wrote, wished to speak with me. The following week, I received a letter from Bohr’s secretary setting up an appointment.
Within one extraordinary year in my young life, I had left the path of Serge Poliakoff and my aspirations to become an abstract painter, and was now starting down a completely different road, towards a door being opened to me by the greatest living Danish physicist, Niels Bohr.
*In technical terms, I was questioning the need for Einstein’s action principle based on a nonsymmetric metric field to satisfy a real Hermitian symmetry. He had been hunting for the most satisfactory action principle that was the basis for the derivation of his unified field theory equations.
ON THE MORNING of my appointment with Niels Bohr, I took a tram to Blegdamsvej 17 in Copenhagen, carrying my manuscripts in a large brown envelope. By this time, I had written a second manuscript about unified field theory. I paused for a few moments outside the three-storey building with its red-tiled roof and little courtyard facing the street, and gazed at the tarnished brass letters spelling out “Niels Bohr Institutet 1920.” I suddenly felt my heart palpitating. What was I going to say? How should I address Niels Bohr? Could he really help me?
Bohr had mapped out the structure of the atom in 1913, and later in the 1920s had helped to develop the quantum revolution. After Ernest Rutherford discovered that there was a hard core in the centre of atoms, consisting of a positively charged nucleus, Bohr produced a model of the atom in which the energy associated with the spectral line radiation* was quantized, or occurred in discrete quantum units. This followed the important discovery by Max Planck in 1900 that radiation emitted by a hot body was not continuous, as had been assumed in classical physics, but came in discrete parcels of energy. In effect, Bohr succeeded in making the atom stable. Previously, the classical model of the atom could not prevent the orbiting electron from spiralling in towards the nucleus. Bohr pictured his atom as a mini-solar system, with the positively charged nucleus playing the role of the sun and the electrons swirling in stable, planet-like orbits around it. However, Bohr’s young assistants, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli, were not able to apply his model of the atom to more complicated spectral line data.
Eventually physicists gave up on the Bohr model as a true visual picture of the atom and developed the modern version of quantum mechanics, which described the electrons and protons in the atom as waves. This new view interpreted the emission of the spectral lines from the atom in terms of probability theory. That is, light, consisting of photons, had only a certain “chance” of being emitted from the atom at any particular time. This new description of the atom gave birth to what is now called quantum mechanics, which revolutionized physics by overthrowing the whole notion of classical physics applying at the subatomic level.
Because of his pioneering work in atomic physics, by 1953, when I met him, Niels Bohr was certainly the most famous scientist in Denmark, and was one of the most famous physicists in the world. He had won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922.
I opened the gate, entered the courtyard and rang the bell next to a door that said “Administration.” A buzzing noise answered me. I pushed the door open and climbed the stairs to an office where a secretary sat at a large oak desk overlooking the gardens and park at the back of the institute building. It was a clear spring day and through the window I could see a soccer game in progress in the park, with young men kicking a ball around the field. Through the glass I could hear their muted shouting and birds in the nearby trees as well. The secretary smiled at me and asked in Danish what my business was. I explained that I had an appointment with Professor Bohr at ten-thirty. “Ah, yes, you’re the young man who is working on Einstein’s unified field theory,” she said, fixing me with a curious gaze. “You may sit in that chair over there and wait for Professor Bohr.”
As I waited, my nervousness increased. I could feel my palms becoming moist. I tried to concentrate on the shouts of the soccer players, and block out all other thoughts. After several minutes a short, stocky, middle-aged man with curly black hair opened the office door and walked over to the secretary, ignoring me. She said, “Dr. Rosenkrantz, this young man has an appointment with Professor Bohr.”
The man turned and looked at me for the first time. “Ah, you’re the young man who is working on Einstein’s unified field theory,” he said.
“Yes,” I replied. “My name is John Moffat.” I stood up and we shook hands.
“Do you have your manuscript on the unified field theory with you?” he asked.
“Yes, I do,” I said, holding up my large brown envelope, which shook slightly in my trembling hands.
“Well, then,” he said, “let’s go in and see Professor Bohr.”
We walked down a long dark corridor and came to an office. When Rosenkrantz opened the door, the strong smell of tobacco smoke wafted out. A tall man with a dome-shaped head and wearing a rumpled brown suit stood in the far corner of the room looking out the window at the soccer game in the park. His hair was thinning, accentuating his large ears.
Rosenkrantz beckoned me into the room and performed the introductions. “Professor Bohr, this young man is John Moffat.”
Niels Bohr removed a pipe from between his thick lips and said in softly spoken Danish, “So, you’re John Moffat?”
I said yes, I was.
“Do you have your manuscript on Einstein’s unified field theory with you?”
“Yes,” I replied. Again, I lifted the envelope. “I have two manuscripts, Professor Bohr. One has to do directly with Einstein’s classical unified field theory. The other attempts to quantize his unified field theory.” *
Bohr then crossed the room to his desk, sat down and contemplated a wooden rack holding pipes of various sizes, standing next to a large Danish matchbox and several tins of tobacco. He took his pipe out of his mouth and, pointing the stem at me, said, in English this time, “Please, sit down, sit down.” I took one of the chairs in front of his desk. Dr. Rosenkrantz sat in a chair next to mine, and placed a notebook on his knee. He took a pen out of his breast pocket, unscrewed the cap and began writing scratchily. I realized that he must be about to take notes, and my palms started sweating again. Was he actually going to record everything that was said?
There was a silence while Bohr picked up one of the tobacco tins from his desk, removed the lid, and poked his bear-like hand inside to pull out a lump of tobacco. He removed his pipe from his mouth and shoved the tobacco into the bowl. Then he carefully took a metal instrument from his pipe stand, tamped the tobacco down into the bowl with it and put the pipe back into his mouth. Next, he picked up an oversized box of matches, took out a match and lit the pipe, making dry sucking sounds as he drew in the smoke. Printed on the matchbox was the familiar Danish trademark H. E. Gosh & Co., with the famous picture of Tordenskjold, the eminent Danish-Norwegian naval hero of the seventeenth century. Everyone had these matchboxes in their kitchens.
