Niels Bohr in North America (1923) and his Meeting with Robert Frost

Abstract

During the autumn of 1923, Niels Bohr stayed for about three months in Canada and the United States where he gave a series of lectures on atomic and quantum theory. This paper provides details about his many meetings and lectures. It deals in particular with his stay at Amherst College, where he had a long conversation with the celebrated poet Robert Frost. Based on new archival sources, the paper includes a more fine-grained and better documented version of the episode than the one offered by literary critics and scholars. It concludes, perhaps somewhat disappointingly, that the Bohr-Frost meeting was of no great importance to either the physicist or the poet.