Niels Bohr and Robert Frost: The Early Quantum Atom in Poetry and Fiction Literature

This paper investigates how physicists’ theories of atomic structure were reflected in English-language fiction novels, poems, and theatrical plays both before and after World War II. The focus is on the early period and on the Rutherford-Bohr model in particular. Special attention is devoted to the little-known lectures that Niels Bohr gave at Amherst College in 1923 and his meeting there with the celebrated poet Robert Frost. The topic has attracted some interest by literary scholars but none by historians of science. Based on new archival sources, the paper includes a more detailed and better documented version of the episode which is here told in the larger context of Bohr’s lecture tours to the United States.