Niels Bohr Trivia
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59 free Niels Bohr trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Niels Bohr trivia quiz covers the Danish physicist who gave the atom its familiar planetary picture and then spent the rest of his life explaining why the picture was not quite right. The easy questions cover the model, the Nobel Prize, Rutherford, Planck and the principle of complementarity. From there it goes into the life: the footballing brother, the goalkeeping, the essay that needed hand-blown glassware, the thesis nobody abroad could read, and the king who was thrilled to meet such a famous football player. The harder end covers the Pickering series, the Bohr Festival, the ill-fated Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory, the hunt for element 72, the 1941 conversation with Heisenberg that nobody can agree on, the escape to Sweden, the flight to Britain that nearly killed him, the alias he used at Los Alamos, Churchill's fury, and the medal that eventually flew to the International Space Station. Every answer was checked against Bohr's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our physics and famous physicists quizzes carry on from here.
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Q 01Bohr's 1922 Nobel citation praised his work on the structure of atoms and on what emanating from them?
Radiation
Radiation completed the citation, and Einstein's prize for 1921 was handed out in 1922 as well, since the committee had found no 1921 nomination good enough and held it back a year.
Q 02Niels Bohr first steered the physicist Max Delbrück toward which science?
Biology
Biology became Delbrück's life's work after Bohr sparked his interest in it, and in 1969 he shared a Nobel Prize for discoveries about how viruses replicate.
Q 03Bohr's father Christian was a university professor of which subject?
Physiology
Physiology was Christian Bohr's subject, and since the university had no physics laboratory, young Niels did the experiments for his first paper in his father's lab instead.
Q 04Which actor plays Niels Bohr in Christopher Nolan's 2023 film Oppenheimer?
Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Branagh plays him, and the film has Oppenheimer snatch a poisoned apple just before Bohr can bite it, though there is no evidence Bohr was ever part of the real incident.
Q 05In which position did Niels Bohr play for the football club Akademisk Boldklub?
Goalkeeper
Goalkeeper was his spot in the 1905 season, but despite an oft-repeated claim he never played for Denmark, unlike his brother Harald, who won Olympic silver in 1908.
Q 06In a story often told about Bohr, a lucky horseshoe is said to work even without what?
Belief in it
Belief in it isn't needed, the quip goes, yet some tellings have Bohr merely passing on the joke about a neighbour's or a fellow physicist's horseshoe, not his own.
Q 07A quip often credited to Bohr says prediction is very difficult, especially about what?
The future
The future is the punchline, yet the earliest known version was spoken, unattributed, in Denmark's parliament in 1937-38, and the line has also been credited to the cartoonist Storm P.
Q 08Bohr's doctoral thesis was on the electron theory of what?
Metals
Metals: Bohr showed that classical electron theory could not explain their magnetic properties, which convinced him that atomic physics needed a radical break.
Q 09Why did Bohr's 1911 doctoral thesis attract little attention?
It was written in Danish
It was written in Danish, and the Dutch physicist Hendrika van Leeuwen later rediscovered one of its theorems independently in her own doctoral thesis.
Q 10In 1911 Bohr went to Cambridge to work under which Nobel laureate, who showed little interest in his thesis?
J. J. Thomson
J. J. Thomson had lost interest in electron theory and paid little attention to Bohr's thesis, so in 1912 Bohr moved on to Rutherford's laboratory in Manchester.
Q 11Bohr's long debate with Einstein over quantum theory began at which 1927 gathering in Brussels?
The Solvay Conference
The Solvay Conference of 1927 was where Einstein raised his objection to the probability view of quantum theory, opening a debate with Bohr that the two carried on for years.
Q 12Bohr's 1913 model of the atom married Rutherford's nucleus to whose quantum theory?
Max Planck
Max Planck's quanta rescued Rutherford's atom: by classical physics its electrons should spiral into the nucleus, but Bohr's quantised orbits kept it stable.
Q 13Bohr's three 1913 atomic papers, 'the trilogy', appeared in which British journal?
Philosophical Magazine
Q 21The 'Bohr Festival', a series of seven lectures, took place in which German university town?
Göttingen
Göttingen: there Bohr first met the student Werner Heisenberg, who by 1924 had come to work with him.
Q 22Bohr's correspondence principle says the new physics reproduces classical physics in the limit of what?
Large quantum numbers
Large quantum numbers: Bohr boldly assumed the match held roughly even for small ones, and used it to predict how bright spectral lines should be.
Q 23The 1924 Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory proposed energy and momentum were conserved only how?
Statistically
Statistically, not event by event, but experiments by Bothe and Geiger soon disproved it, and Bohr asked for 'as honourable a funeral as possible'.
Philosophical Magazine carried all three, and the atom they described, electrons in fixed orbits around a nucleus, is still the best-known picture of an atom.
Q 14Whose decades-old formula for hydrogen's spectral lines did Bohr's 1913 model finally explain?
Balmer's
Balmer's formula had fitted hydrogen's lines since the 1880s though nobody knew why, until the first paper of Bohr's trilogy derived it from his model.
Q 15Challenged over the Pickering series of spectral lines, Bohr correctly said they came from what?
Ionised helium
Ionised helium: Pickering and Fowler had blamed an unusual form of hydrogen, but Bohr's analysis, confirmed by tests in Rutherford's laboratory, won Fowler over.
Q 16Einstein called Bohr's atomic model 'the highest form of' what 'in the sphere of thought'?
Musicality
Musicality: in his Autobiographical Notes, Einstein marvelled that Bohr had found the laws of spectral lines on a foundation Einstein saw as insecure and contradictory.
Q 17In the early 1920s, Bohr's picture of how electrons are arranged in atoms explained what?
The periodic table
The periodic table: Bohr showed that the electrons in an atom's outer orbits largely decide its chemical properties, giving the table's repeating pattern a physical reason.
Q 18Which brewery's foundation gave Bohr the grant for his 1911 study trip to England?
Carlsberg
Carlsberg: its founder J. C. Jacobsen willed the brewery itself to the foundation, so profits from beer have paid for science in Denmark ever since.
Q 19Which element, predicted by Bohr to resemble zirconium, was discovered at his institute?
Hafnium
Hafnium: a French chemist had claimed element 72 was a rare earth, but it turned up in Norwegian zircon, just as Bohr's theory had said.
Q 20At Los Alamos, which future Nobel laureate did Bohr seek out for one-on-one talks to test his ideas?
Richard Feynman
Richard Feynman: most others were too in awe of Bohr to argue with him, but Feynman would say plainly when an idea was crazy.
Q 24Bohrium's discoverers feared its name would be confused with which element?
Boron
Boron: they wanted 'nielsbohrium', but IUPAC said no element had used a scientist's full name, and bohrium became official in 1997.
Q 25Which philosophical principle did Bohr conceive to reconcile wave and particle descriptions?
Complementarity
Complementarity: Bohr thought it through on a skiing holiday in Norway in early 1927 and first presented it that September at a congress in Como.
Q 26Which film genre did Bohr enjoy watching at the cinema with his students?
Westerns
Westerns: he would accept each unlikely rescue in the plot, but not that someone just happened to be there with a film camera.
Q 27Bohr's 1936 theory of the compound nucleus pictured the nucleus as behaving like what?
A drop of liquid
A drop of liquid: the model let Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch explain in 1939 how an atomic nucleus could split in two.
Q 28In 1939 Bohr worked out that fission with slow neutrons was mainly due to which isotope?
Uranium-235
Uranium-235: Bohr argued that this rare isotope, not the far more common uranium-238, was responsible, and in April 1940 Dunning's team at Columbia University proved him right.
Q 29With whom did Bohr publish 'The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission' in September 1939?
John Wheeler
John Wheeler: they took up the problem after Bohr brought news of fission to America, and their paper appeared on 1 September 1939, the day Germany invaded Poland.
Q 30To hide two Nobel medals from the Nazis at Bohr's institute, George de Hevesy dissolved them in what?
Aqua regia
Aqua regia: the solution sat undisturbed on a shelf through the occupation, and after the war the Nobel Foundation recast the medals from the recovered gold.