Two men tower above all other 20th-century physicists. One was lucid, quotable, persuasive and peripatetic; the other, complex, obscure, misunderstood, living and working almost entirely in the land of his birth. One was Einstein. The other was Bohr. While almost everyone has heard of Albert Einstein, few outside the halls of science have heard of Niels Bohr. Yet if we owe our understanding of the Universe in the large to the insight of Einstein, it was Bohr who first untangled the complexities of microscopic matter and wove them into a coherent pattern that revealed the true depths of meaning within the inner space of the atom and its nucleus.

LRB 20 August 1992 | PDF Download