Hans Halvorson

Atomfysik og menneskelig erkendelse II / Essays 1958–1962 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge

The last five years. Assembled by Bohr and published by his son Aage shortly after his death, including the unfinished Light and Life Revisited and the Rutherford Memorial Lecture.

The text

Eight volumes are planned, four Danish and four English; this is volume III of each. Both sides are transcriptions of published texts, not translations made here: the English is Bohr’s own published English, most of it written by him in that language. The Danish follows Filosofiske Skrifter, Bind III (Forlaget Philosophia, København 2013, with the Niels Bohr Arkiv); the English follows Woodbridge, Conn.: Ox Bow Press, 1987. Reprint of Interscience Publishers, New York 1963.

# Danish English First published
0 Forord (Danish only) Af Aage Bohr, skrevet til samlingen Atomfysik og menneskelig erkendelse II, udgivet kort efter faderens død. Den engelske Preface står i Ox Bow-udgaven på romertalssiderne
1 Kvantefysik og filosofi – Kausalitet og komplementaritet Quantum Physics and Philosophy –- Causality and Complementarity R. Klibansky (ed.), Philosophy in the Mid-Century: A Survey, La Nuova Italia Editrice, Firenze 1958, pp. 308–314
2 Den menneskelige erkendelses enhed The Unity of Human Knowledge Revue de la Fondation Européenne de la Culture, July 1961, pp. 63–66
3 Forbindelsen mellem videnskaberne The Connection Between the Sciences Journal Mondial de Pharmacie 3 (1960) 262–267
4 Lys og liv påny Light and Life Revisited ICSU Review 5 (1963) 194–199
5 Rutherford mindeforelæsning 1958 – Erindringer om grundlæggeren af kernefysikken og om den udvikling, der bygger på hans værk The Rutherford Memorial Lecture 1958: Reminiscences of the Founder of Nuclear Science and of Some Developments Based on his Work Proceedings of the Physical Society 78 (1961) 1083–1115
6 Kvantemekanikkens tilblivelse The Genesis of Quantum Mechanics Werner Heisenberg und die Physik unserer Zeit, Vieweg und Sohn, Braunschweig 1961; first English printing in Essays 1958–1962 on Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, Interscience Publishers, New York 1963, pp. 74–78
7 Solvay-møderne og kvantefysikkens udvikling The Solvay Meetings and the Development of Quantum Physics La théorie quantique des champs, Douzième Conseil de physique, Université Libre de Bruxelles, 9–14 October 1961, Interscience Publishers, New York 1962, pp. 13–36

Status: skeleton. 8 pieces scaffolded; no text transcribed yet.

Editorial note

This edition’s one substantive addition to the existing printings is dual marginal pagination. Bohr is normally cited from the collected volumes — “PWNB III, p. 74” — but the arguments were first made in journals, congress proceedings and Festschriften, and it is that pagination the contemporary correspondence and the Niels Bohr Collected Works cite. A reader working between the two has had to convert by hand. Here both are marked:

  • [n], bold, in the left margin — page n of the original publication named in that essay’s First published line above.
  • |n|, italic, in the right margin — page n of the collected volume: Ox Bow Press in English, Philosophia in Danish.

Ox Bow is the touchstone for the English series — that is what a “PWNB III, p. n” citation means to a reader. As it happens the choice costs nothing for vols I–III: each was checked against the printed Ox Bow copy and each reproduces its source photographically, so Ox Bow and the first printings (Cambridge 1934, Wiley 1958, Interscience 1963) agree page for page.

Markers sit at the exact word the page turns on. They are set with marginnote rather than \marginpar so that they survive inside block quotations, lists and footnotes, where \marginpar silently drops them. Because the collected editions reset the type, the two series interleave irregularly; that is the point.

The Danish text is Philosophia’s, and Philosophia modernises

One departure from this repository’s usual practice has to be stated plainly. The Danish here follows Filosofiske Skrifter (Philosophia 2013), which keeps Bohr’s titles in their original orthography but modernises the prose — legemernes ligevægt og bevægelser where 1925 printed Legemernes Ligevægt og Bevægelser. So the Danish is not a diplomatic transcription of a first printing in the way the rest of this collection is.

That is deliberate. Most of these pieces were written and first published in English or German; Philosophia’s Danish is itself a translation, and for them there is no original Danish to be faithful to. Setting the minority that were first printed in Danish from their own first printings, while taking the rest from Philosophia, would produce a volume in two orthographies. Philosophia throughout is the coherent choice.

Within that text the transcription is diplomatic in the usual sense: set as printed, errors preserved and logged in a % comment at the site, never silently corrected.

Because of this, [n] on the Danish side marks the first printing of the text in whatever language it appeared: a Danish printing where one exists, otherwise the English or German article whose pagination the literature cites. Each essay’s First published line names it, so it is always clear which.

Each essay’s First published line carries a DOI, or two: the original article’s own DOI where the publisher has registered one, and the Niels Bohr Collected Works chapter, which reproduces essentially everything Bohr published. Both are live links in the PDF.

The Collected Works link matters most for the pieces that will never have a DOI of their own — the Danish articles in Fysisk Tidsskrift, Naturens Verden, Tilskueren and Ingeniøren, and the congress volumes and Festschriften. Every piece with a separate printing carries at least one resolvable link; only the prefaces, which were written for their volumes, carry none.

Where a piece appeared in more than one place, both are given: Bind I’s Atomteorien og Grundprincipperne, for instance, links its Danish first printing in the 1929 Naturforskermøde proceedings and its German printing in Naturwissenschaften 18. Where no DOI exists but the article is on JSTOR, a stable JSTOR URL stands in.

Each link was verified by matching the registered volume and page range against the citation recorded here, not merely by matching a title.

Rights

Unlike everything else in this collection, these texts are not public domain. Bohr died in 1962; the Danish edition (Philosophia 2013) and the English (Ox Bow Press) are both in copyright. Permission to publish has been obtained, and this volume is live on the site. The permission covers the eight volumes described here; further Bohr material — correspondence, the Collected Works, the unpublished manuscripts in the Niels Bohr Arkiv — is not covered by it and should not be added without checking.

All notes and essays · Catalog