Niels Bohr’s House And The Carlsberg Beer Company

It’s no surprise that a lot of company heads are fans of science. Sinclair Oil’s CEO loved paleontology, and they funded a lot of research. The term “fossil fuel”, coined in 1759, was to note that it was natural, while that paleontology Sinclair loved said oil began to form during the Mesozoic era – when dinosaurs lived. So he made it their logo.

And so anti-science hippies somewhere along the way decided that all oil came from dinosaurs.

Now science knows coal developed long before that, and rather than being dinosaurs oil is overwhelmingly the result of bacteria, aquatic phytoplankton, and zooplankton.

Other companies have showed science the love as well. The Carlsberg beer company was so proud of Niels Bohr for winning the Nobel Prize in 1922, they gave him free use of a house next to the brewery – which had been built for the founder, who had himself built the Carlsberg Laboratory in 1875.

An urban myth – repeated again by, unsurprisingly, Buzzfeed – is that they even put in a tap from the brewery to his house but that isn’t so. 

They did give him free beer, though. That is next level support for science. Your move, Bill Gates!