Two Copenhagen policemen drew near to the bank building, hands on their holsters.  They had seen a figure trying to climb the building late at night and they probably thought they were about to halt a robbery.  But one of them looked upward and got a good view of the "burglar."

"Oh, that's only Professor Bohr!" he said.

Skiing, sailing, soccer—the big, gentle genius with the stocky figure and the great head was capable at them all, and climbing a building did not seem incompatible with his activities as chief of the Institute for Theoretical Research.  His manners were unassuming, his courtesy and patience were legendary, and he was internationally famous for his absent-mindedness, but the physicists of his time knew him best as a master theoretician who had formulated their first workable concept of atomic structure.  By postulating the orbital behavior of electrons in accordance with Max Planck's quantum theory, he had laid the groundwork for what was to be the most devastating scientific breakthrough of the century—the splitting of the atom.

Robert Silverberg has recaptured in a remarkably authentic tour de force the excitement, suspense, humor and personal drama inside the research in remote continental laboratories, American college labs and unmapped mystery towns.  

Mankind, which has still to make its final decision on its own fate, can do no better than study the example of Niels Bohr.  As a founder of UNESCO'S Centre Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, a participant in the 1955 International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, and the recipient of the first Atoms for Peace Award, he can be said to have devoted as much of his energy toward world peace as he did to investigating the internal structure of the atom.  Here, for the first time, is the whole inspiring story of his life.

From the dust jacket