The Bohr Festival () was a series of seven lectures given by

Niels Bohr Niels Henrik David Bohr (, ; ; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and old quantum theory, quantum theory, for which he received the No ...

12 to 22 June 1922 at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in

Göttingen Göttingen (, ; ; ) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. According to the 2022 German census, t ...

. These were the Wolfskehl Lectures, funded by the Wolfskehl Foundation. Taking place in the fortnight leading up to the

Göttingen International Handel Festival The Göttingen International Handel Festival (German, ''Internationale Händel-Festspiele Göttingen'') is a German festival of baroque music, based in Göttingen, Germany. The festival was established in 1919 by Oskar Hagen, art historian and f ...

, it became known as the Bohr Festival. In 1991,

Friedrich Hund Friedrich Hermann Hund (4 February 1896 – 31 March 1997) was a German physicist from Karlsruhe known for his work on atoms and molecules. He is known for the Hund's rules to predict the electron configuration of chemical elements. His work on H ...

suggested that

James Franck James Franck (; 26 August 1882 – 21 May 1964) was a German-American physicist who received the 1925 Nobel Prize in Physics with Gustav Hertz "for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom". He completed hi ...

responsible for the comparison. In the lectures Bohr outlined the current development of the Bohr-Sommerfeld theory, remarking "how incomplete and uncertain everything still is".

References

{{quantum-stub 1920 in Germany Works about quantum mechanics 1920 speeches