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60 free Niels Bohr trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 01In which year was Bohr awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics?
1922
The citation covered both his atomic model and his early leadership of the new quantum theory.
Q 02Bohr's Nobel Prize recognised his investigation of the structure of what?
Atoms
His model had electrons in fixed orbits that could jump between energy levels, emitting quanta of light.
Q 03Bohr's father Christian was a university professor of which subject?
Physiology
The young Bohr did his prize-winning experiments in his father's laboratory because the university had no physics lab.
Q 04Bohr's brother Harald, a mathematician, represented Denmark at the 1908 Olympics in which sport?
Football
The brothers played together for the Akademisk Boldklub, and Denmark took silver at those London Games.
Q 05In which position did Niels play for the Akademisk Boldklub?
Goalkeeper
Legend has it he was once caught working out a maths problem against the goalpost while play was at the other end.
Q 06Bohr's prize-winning 1905 essay measured the surface tension of liquids using what?
A vibrating water jet
He improved on Lord Rayleigh's method, allowing for viscosity, and submitted the essay at the last minute.
Q 07For his 1905 experiments Bohr had to make what himself, since none existed with the right shape?
Glass tubes with elliptical cross-sections
An improved version of the paper went to the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions.
Q 08Bohr's doctoral thesis was on the electron theory of what?
Metals
He concluded that electron theory could not fully explain their magnetic properties, a result later called the Bohr-Van Leeuwen theorem.
Q 09Why did Bohr's groundbreaking 1911 PhD thesis attract little attention outside Scandinavia?
It was written in Danish
It was a university requirement at the time; a Dutch physicist independently derived one of its theorems a decade later.
Q 10In 1911 Bohr went to Cambridge to work under which discoverer of the electron, whom he failed to impress?
J. J. Thomson
He got on better with the younger crowd, including Rutherford, who invited him to Manchester.
Q 11Under which Manchester physicist did Bohr do post-doctoral work, building on his nuclear model?
Ernest Rutherford
There he met Charles Galton Darwin, whom he called 'the grandson of the real Darwin'.
Q 12Bohr's 1913 model of the atom married Rutherford's nucleus to whose quantum theory?
Max Planck
The result was electrons confined to 'stationary states' that could only jump between fixed orbits.
Q 13Bohr's three 1913 papers, 'the trilogy', appeared in which journal?
Philosophical Magazine
They were published in July, September and November of that year.
Q 21The 'Bohr Festival' of June 1922, a series of seven lectures, took place in which German university town?
Göttingen
The talks coincided with the town's Handel festival, hence the nickname.
Q 22Bohr's correspondence principle says the new physics reproduces classical physics in the limit of what?
Large quantum numbers
He laid it out in his Nobel lecture as part of a survey of what was then known about the atom.
Q 23The 1924 Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory proposed energy and momentum were conserved only how?
Statistically
Experiments by Bothe and Geiger soon killed it; Bohr asked for the idea to be given 'as honourable a funeral as possible'.
Q 14Whose 30-year-old formula for hydrogen's spectral lines did Bohr's model finally explain?
Balmer's
He derived it from first principles in the first paper of the trilogy.
Q 15Challenged over the Pickering series of spectral lines, Bohr correctly said they came from what?
Ionised helium
Helium atoms with a single electron behave like heavy hydrogen, and his model handled them perfectly.
Q 16Einstein called Bohr's atomic model 'the highest form of' what 'in the sphere of thought'?
Musicality
Older physicists such as Thomson, Rayleigh and Lorentz disliked the trilogy; the young ones saw a breakthrough.
Q 17When Bohr was presented as a new professor, King Christian X was delighted to meet such a famous what?
Football player
The king had confused him with his brother Harald, the Olympian.
Q 18Which brewery's foundation partly funded Bohr's 1911 trip to England and later his institute?
Carlsberg
He later lived in the brewer's honorary mansion, reserved for Denmark's most eminent contributor to science or the arts.
Q 19Which element, predicted by Bohr to resemble zirconium, was discovered at his institute in 1923?
Hafnium
Named for the Latin name of the city where it was found, it turned out to be more common than gold.
Q 20Which French chemist challenged Bohr by claiming element 72 was a rare earth he called 'celtium'?
Georges Urbain
Coster and de Hevesy proved Bohr right by searching mineral samples for a zirconium-like metal.
Q 24Bohrium, the element named after Bohr, has which atomic number?
107
An asteroid and a lunar crater are also named for him.
Q 25Which philosophical principle did Bohr conceive to reconcile wave and particle descriptions?
Complementarity
It dominated his thinking in physics and philosophy alike, and he felt professional philosophers never quite grasped it.
Q 26Who first occupied the Danish honorary mansion Bohr moved into in 1932?
Harald Hoffding
The philosopher had taught Bohr and been a friend of his father.
Q 27Bohr's 1936 theory of the compound nucleus pictured the nucleus as deformable like what?
A drop of liquid
The picture later let him work out which uranium isotope was splitting.
Q 28In 1939 Bohr worked out that fission with slow neutrons was mainly due to which isotope?
Uranium-235
He announced 'I have understood everything' after a few minutes' thought; Dunning proved him right in 1940.
Q 29With whom did Bohr publish 'The Mechanism of Nuclear Fission' in September 1939?
John Wheeler
Wheeler was later Richard Feynman's doctoral advisor at Princeton.
Q 30To hide two Nobel medals from the occupying Germans, Bohr had de Hevesy dissolve them in what?
Aqua regia
The gold sat in solution on a shelf until after the war, then was precipitated and re-struck by the Nobel Foundation.