The UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal was first minted in 1985 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Danish nuclear physicist

Niels Bohr Niels Henrik David Bohr (; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 ...

. It is awarded by

UNESCO The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) aimed at promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education, arts, sciences and culture. It ...

to recognise those who have made outstanding contributions to physics through research that has or could have a significant influence on the world.

The medal

In 1985, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Niels Bohr,

minted a gold medal to commemorate the father of quantum physics and one of the most eminent scientists of the 20th century. Sculpted by Siv Holme-Muse of Sweden, the medal bears the profile of Bohr while the rear depicts his drawing of electrons orbiting around an atomic structure, his formula ''E2-E1=hy2'' representing electrons in relation to hydrogen, and his signature. It also bears the inscription: ''Contraria sunt complementa'' (Opposites are complementary), Bohr's

principle of complementarity In physics, complementarity is a conceptual aspect of quantum mechanics that Niels Bohr regarded as an essential feature of the theory. The complementarity principle holds that objects have certain pairs of complementary properties which cannot al ...

2013 awards

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia was one of the three celebrities who were presented with the medal for 2013 at an event in honour of the 100th anniversary of Bohr's atomic model. The other two were the German particle physicist and director of CERN Rolf-Dieter Heuer, who accepted the medal on behalf of the CERN laboratory, and the French physicist

Alain Aspect Alain Aspect (; born 15 June 1947) is a French physicist noted for his experimental work on quantum entanglement. Aspect was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, "for experiments with entangl ...

, noted for his work on

quantum entanglement Quantum entanglement is the phenomenon that occurs when a group of particles are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in a way such that the quantum state of each particle of the group cannot be described independently of the state of ...

. The medals were presented at the

University of Copenhagen The University of Copenhagen ( da, Københavns Universitet, KU) is a prestigious public research university in Copenhagen, Denmark. Founded in 1479, the University of Copenhagen is the second-oldest university in Scandinavia after Uppsala Unive ...

conference on "An Open World" on 5 December 2013 by

Princess Marie of Denmark Princess Marie of Denmark, Countess of Monpezat, (''née'' Marie Agathe Odile Cavallier, born 6 February 1976) is a member of the Danish royal family. She is the second wife of Prince Joachim of Denmark, the younger son of Queen Margrethe I ...

. In connection with the ceremony, Wales participated in the session "The Internet: A Global Infrastructure of Openness?" with a presentation titled "Wikipedia, Democracy and the Internet".

Recipients

Recipients of the UNESCO gold medal include: ;1998 *

Vitaly Ginzburg Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, ForMemRS (russian: Вита́лий Ла́заревич Ги́нзбург, link=no; 4 October 1916 – 8 November 2009) was a Russian physicist who was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003, together wit ...

Walter Kohn Walter Kohn (; March 9, 1923 – April 19, 2016) was an Austrian-American theoretical physicist and theoretical chemist. He was awarded, with John Pople, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1998. The award recognized their contributions to the unde ...

;2005 *

Martin Rees Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 23 June 1942) is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, ...

Herwig Schopper Herwig Franz Schopper (born 28 February 1924) is a Czech-born experimental physicist and was the director general of CERN from 1981 to 1988. Biography Schopper was born in Lanškroun, Bohemia, to a family of Austrian descent. He obtained his d ...

Peter Zoller Peter may refer to: People * List of people named Peter, a list of people and fictional characters with the given name * Peter (given name) ** Saint Peter (died 60s), apostle of Jesus, leader of the early Christian Church * Peter (surname), a su ...

;2010 *

John Pendry Sir John Brian Pendry, (born 4 July 1943) is an English theoretical physicist known for his research into refractive indices and creation of the first practical " Invisibility Cloak". He is a professor of theoretical solid state physics at Impe ...

Timothy Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profes ...

* Kip S. Thorne ;2013 *

* CERN (presented to Rolf-Dieter Heuer) * Jimmy Wales

References

{{reflist Engineering awards Physics awards Awards established in 1955 UNESCO awards

The medal

2013 awards

Recipients

See also

References