Jewish physics: 'The Man Who Broke Reality' spotlights Nazi-defying scientist Niels Bohr - review

NOVEMBER 14, 2026 04:14In 1998, Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen opened to great acclaim on the London stage. It purported to elucidate a conversation between the great Danish scientist, Niels Bohr, and the German Werner Heisenberg, in the autumn of 1941.This conversation occurred during the occupation of Denmark by the Nazis, who regarded the country as a model for Aryan states. The Danes, with few resources, did not resist the Nazi takeover, but its social democratic government rebuffed German pressure to take action against its Jews.Frayn’s brilliant and insightful play was marvelous theater, but the question is still unresolved as to whether it reflected the reality of history. In this excellent biography, The Man Who Broke Reality by Philip Ball, Bohr is revealed as a great humanitarian who tried to help many Jewish colleagues who had fled Nazism, and in particular after the introduction of the race laws.Many found refuge in Copenhagen before traveling on to other destinations. Bohr had a list of them, which he would take abroad on his travels in an effort to find them posts.The Nazis had realized that an atomic weapon could be manufactured from transuranium elements such as plutonium. Enormous amounts of energy would be emitted through nuclear fission. In 1938, a cyclotron began operating in Copenhagen, which hurled protons at atoms.HEADQUARTERS OF Schalburg Corps, a Danish SS unit, in Copenhagen, post-1943. Bohr escaped to Sweden with other Danish Jews. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)A central location for the developing knowledge of this process in Nazi-occupied Europe was in Niels Bohr’s Institute. All this was probably Heisenberg’s raison d’etre for visiting Bohr in Copenhagen.The emotionless Heisenberg had withdrawn from the world of politics into the safety of scientific exploration during the 1920s.Bohr himself was of Jewish origin, a 'white Jew'With Hitler’s rise, Nazi scientists accused him of being “a white Jew” – even though he was not Jewish – someone who colluded in the conspiracy of “Jewish physics.” Despite this, was Heisenberg acting as merely an apolitical, goodwill ambassador for national socialism in visiting Bohr? Or was the motivation more sinister, such as the quest for a Nazi atomic weapon?Most Danes ostracized him during his visit when hints of the mass murder of Jews were filtering through.After the war, Heisenberg argued that he had operated within the confines of Nazi oppression to maintain control of the nuclear project and to keep it out of the hands of Hitler.In a letter, never sent, in 1958, Bohr said that Heisenberg’s explanation was little more than an apologia for German nationalism. Numerous Jewish scientists such as Lise Meitner believed that Heisenberg had then regarded Germany’s victory in World War II as inevitable.Bohr himself was of Jewish origin. His mother, Ellen, was the daughter of David Baruch Adler and Jenny Raphael – a liberal banking family which had settled in Copenhagen in 1850. The family was highly assimilated, and Bohr was brought up as a Lutheran. He broke with Christianity when he heard a clergyman say that the sinking of the Titanic was “God’s will.”Bohr went to the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and worked under J. J. Thomson, who had discovered the electron. He then began to work with Ernest Rutherford – a second father to him – at the University of Manchester, where Chaim Weizmann had been a researcher.Rutherford’s work on radioactivity and the half-lives of elements led Bohr to develop a new theory of the structure of the atom. The plum-pudding model of embedded subatomic particles had been replaced by a solar system model of electrons revolving around a nucleus.Bohr argued that an electron occupied a specific energy level. When an electron jumped from one “quantized” orbit to the next, a photon of light was emitted. This was the key to understanding the structure of the periodic table of elements and ultimately to predicting the place in the table of yet undiscovered elements.Bohr's ideas enthused and astounded the scientific communityBohr’s revolutionary ideas on quantum mechanics enthused and astounded the scientific community during the 1920s. The author, Philip Ball, writes in his introduction:Devised to explain how the world works at the finest grain then perceptible by experiment – a world fragmented into atoms and their subatomic components – quantum mechanics threw into question everything that both physics and common sense had previously supposed.Copenhagen became a center of this innovative research which drew many Jewish scientists toward Niels Bohr. Stefan Rozenthal, Otto Frisch, Max Born and Leo Szilard were amongst many Jews who made their way to the Niels Bohr Institute. The Rockefeller Foundation often provided the funds to help them. A newly discovered element was named hafnium after the Latin name for Copenhagen.Other scientists worshiped at the Nazi altar. In 1931, 100 Authors Against Einstein was published, which deplored “Jewish physics.”On Hitler’s accession to power, Albert Einstein did not return to Germany and settled in Princeton as his academic home.During this period of uncovering the building blocks of matter – and indeed of anti-matter, Bohr was as famous then as Einstein or Hawking are renown today. Bohr and Einstein remained friends but disagreed with each other. Einstein believed that quantum processes could not be governed by chance “as if by a dice-throwing God.”Science overlapped with questions of philosophy and religion. Crick and Watson, the discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA, had both read Erwin Schrödinger’s book What is Life?Erwin Schroedinger, who had devised his famous wave equation, was a refugee from Nazism and found a post at Trinity College, Dublin.In early 1943, Bohr received a message from the British via the Danish resistance. It warned that he was in danger of being deported to Germany. During that summer, a wave of strikes and sabotage in Denmark persuaded Hitler to change the Nazi kid-glove treatment of the country. Denmark was to become Judenrein.The German diplomat, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, alerted the Danes, and the vast majority of Denmark’s Jews were famously spirited across the straits to Sweden. Bohr was similarly taken to Sweden and then flown to Britain on Churchill’s orders. He was hosted at London’s Savoy Hotel.Bohr was subsequently taken to Los Alamos under the pseudonym “Nicholas Baker.” His task was to provide advice and insights to the younger scientists there.While neither Einstein nor Bohr had a role in building the bomb, they did lay the theoretical basis for it. Both attempted to stop nuclear proliferation after the war and to prevent an arms race with the Soviet Union.Bohr had visited the USSR during the 1930s and was hosted by the “Old Bolshevik,” the intellectual, Nikolai Bukharin, who was executed in 1938 in Stalin’s Great Purge. Bohr attempted to persuade the Kremlin to allow Pyotr Kapitza, with whom he had worked at Cambridge, to leave the USSR, but to no avail. He also tried to help Lev Landau, who had been imprisoned.THE MAN WHO BROKE REALITY: NIELS BOHR AND THE MAKING OF MODERN PHYSICS By Philip Ball The Bridge Street Press 512 pages; $30 (credit: Courtesy)In his last decade, Bohr was a central mover in establishing CERN in Switzerland and the construction of the Large Hadron Collider. It was created in the spirit of cooperation between scientists of all nationalities – a unique achievement in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Philip Ball’s biography has reclaimed not only the life and times of Bohr but also that of many half-forgotten figures who made major contributions to our knowledge over a century ago. It reclaims those scientists, Jewish and non-Jewish, who lived in an epoch of dictators and authoritarian politicians and tried to find a way through the morass of moral dilemmas. A perceptive and absorbing book about an underpublicized subject – and an accessible read.■THE MAN WHO BROKE REALITY: NIELS BOHR AND THE MAKING OF MODERN PHYSICSBy Philip BallThe Bridge Street Press512 pages; $30Follow us on Google