Niels Bohr

Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark; his father was a professor of physiology and his mother came from a Jewish banking family. He and his brother Harald were both excellent footballers. After earning his doctorate he worked in England with Ernest Rutherford, who had discovered that atoms have a small, heavy nucleus. In 1913 Bohr proposed that electrons orbit the nucleus only at certain fixed energy levels and give off or absorb light when they jump between them, which explained the colors of light given off by hydrogen. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. His institute in Copenhagen became the world center for the new quantum physics, and he debated its meaning for years with Einstein. In 1943, under German occupation, Bohr, whose mother was Jewish, escaped by fishing boat to Sweden; he helped persuade Sweden to offer refuge to Danish Jews. He then went to Britain and the United States and advised on the atomic bomb project. After the war he urged international control of atomic weapons and helped found CERN. He died in 1962.

Faith: Faith not well documented; his mother came from a Jewish family. Source: Wikipedia