Harmony and Unity: The Life of Niels Bohr

It was no accident that Danish physicist Niels Bohr, father of quantum mechanics, chose the yin-yang symbol for his coat of arms. In the subatomic realm he found evidence of ``complementarity,'' a unity of seeming opposites, and he strived to apply this principle to the human world, where an element of eternity underlies life's constant flux. Blaedel, a Danish science writer, brings upbut fails to developthe tantalizing connections between Bohr's scientific work and overall outlook. Interwoven with photographs, this adulatory, superficial biography is more interesting in showing how modern physics was born out of the collaborative efforts of Bohr, Einstein, Rutherford, Dirac, Heisenberg et al. Blaedel has almost nothing to say about the months Bohr spent in Los Alamos, speeding the atom bomb's development, but he details Bohr's campaign against its deployment. Anecdotes capture a modest genius who was determined never to say an unkind word about anyone. (June)