Google pays tribute to physicist Niels Bohr with doodle

Search giant Google on Sunday paid homage to Nobel Prize winner physicist Niels Bohr, who had contributed immensely to our understanding of atomic structure and quantum mechanics.

Visitors to the Google homepage (www.google.com) were greeted with a doodle showing equations for quantum mechanics, with the tip indicating Bohr's 127th birth anniversary.

As in the past, clicking on the doodle will take the visitor to a Google Search Results page for "Niels Bohr."

"In addition to his major contributions to theoretical physics, Bohr was an excellent administrator. The institute he headed is now named for him, and he helped found CERN, Europe's great particle accelerator and research station," the US Public Broadcasting Service said.
Bohr was born Oct. 7, 1885 in Copenhagen, Denmark.

He studied physics and played soccer at the University of Copenhagen and traveled to England on a study grant and worked under J.J. Thomson, who had discovered the electron.

In 1922, he received the Nobel Prize for his model of the atomic structure.

Bohr returned to Denmark as a professor at the University of Copenhagen, and founded the Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1920. He remained director of the institute for the rest of his life.

When Hitler took power in Germany, Bohr was concerned for his colleagues there and offered many escaping Jewish scientists a place to live and work.

He even donated his gold Nobel medal to the Finnish war effort.

After the German army occupied Denmark, Bohr's family fled to Sweden in a fishing boat. Bohr and his son Aage left Sweden, in the empty bomb rack of a British military plane.

They went to the United States, and joined the Manhattan Project, which worked on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, though Bohr had qualms about the bomb's consequences.

In 1955, Bohr organized the Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva.

He died at home on Nov. 18, 1962, following a stroke