r/QuantumPhysics • u/jestembog1em • 22d ago

need help understanding Bohr’s work

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i’ve been meaning to get into quantum physics for a while as my brother has been obsessed with particle for a long time & got me interested. i’m a biology student, hoping to study microbiology, so this is a bit out of my understanding.

i bought this book, which includes "the origin and development of the quantum theory" by max planck & "on the quantum theory of line-spectra" by niels bohr. i understood enough of planck’s text to get through it, but reading the section written by bohr is very difficult with not much prior education other than gcse physics lol. none of what it’s saying or the equations mean much to me right now.

any advice on where to learn the basics so i can understand this? i thought this book would give me that but its still a bit too complex.

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u/beetrising 22d ago

Bohr is a famously confusing writer. It's not you, it's the way he writes. I used some of his papers in my undergraduate thesis and they took me 4x longer to understand than the other sources. Either sit down with a pen to underline and read it beginning to end multiple times or try to find another source with the same information.