Encyclopedia > Institute for Theoretical Physics, Copenhagen
The Niels Bohr Institute is part of the Niels Bohr Institute for Astronomy, Physics and Geophysics of the University of Copenhagen.
The Institute was founded in 1921. The famous Danish theoretical physicist Niels Bohr was on its faculty from 1914 onwards. On Niels Bohr's 80th birthday - October 7, 1965 - the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Copenhagen officially became The Niels Bohr Institute.
During the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s, the Institute was the center of the developing disciplines of atomic physics and quantum physics. Physicists from across Europe (and sometimes further abroad) often visited the Institute to confer with Bohr on new theories and discoveries. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is named after work done at the Institute during this time.
R(obert) Bruce Lindsay (1900-1985), professor of physics, was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on January 1, 1900.
He was a graduate student and instructor in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the next two years.
He was named Hazard Professor of Physics in 1936 and chairman of the Physics Department in 1934, a post which he held until he became dean of the Graduate School in 1954.
Physical variables were to be represented by arrays of numbers; under the influence of Einstein's paper on relativity (1905), he took the variables to represent not hidden, inaccessible structures but “observable” (i.e., measurable) quantities.
Indeterminacy principles are characteristic of quantum physics; they state the theoretical limitations imposed upon any pair of noncommuting (i.e., conjugate) variables, such as the matrix representations of position and momentum; in such cases, the measurement of one affects the measurement of the other.
This new conception of the measurement process in physics emphasized the active role of the scientist, who, in making measurements, interacted with the observed object and thus caused it to be revealed not as it is in itself but as a function of measurement.
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