A naturalistic review of a treatise on the logic of scientific knowledge

Resumo

When Niels Bohr proposed his quantum model of one-electron atoms, in 1913, he did not only give a successful explana-tion for a class of spectroscopic data, but also made certain ex-perimental predictions that were soon confirmed. In Vienna, hisHungarian friend Georg von Hevesy informed Albert Einstein ofthese results, and the latter's reaction is registered, in slightly eccen-tric English, in a letter of Flevesy's to Bohr: [...] When he heard this he was extremely astonished and told me: "Then the frequency of the light does not depend at all onthe freqtrency of the electron" [...] And this is an enormous achiewement. The theory of Bohr must then be wright [...] (Mehra & Rechenberg (1982), p. 201).