Privatdozent Photo Edition #13

Five Nobel Laureates (1931)

Fermi, Debye, Heisenberg, Stern, Corbino and Bohr at the Rome Conference on Nuclear Physics in 1931.

Niels Bohr (1885-1962) and Werner Heisenberg (1901-76) were close friends in the 1920s and early 30s. The latter had studied under Bohr in Copenhagen in the years 1924-25 after being granted a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship on account of his habilitation thesis on the anomalous ‘Zeeman effect’, supervised by Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951). Sommerfeld had brought Heisenberg to attend the inaugural Bohr Festival in Göttingen in June of 1922. At the event, Bohr gave comprehensive lectures on quantum atomic physics which had a lasting effect on Heisenberg. This was also where the two first met. It was under the influence of Bohr in Copenhagen that Heisenberg wrote his breakthrough paper "Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen" ("Quantum theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations") two years later.

In the photograph above, Bohr…