- Person
- Max Born
- Lived
- 1882–1970
- Field
- Quantum mechanics
- From
- German-British
The story
Max Born was born in 1882 in Breslau, now Wrocław in Poland, into a family of Jewish descent; his father Gustav was a professor of embryology. Trained in mathematics at Göttingen under David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski, he became a Privatdozent there in 1909. At his boarding house he shared lodgings with the Hungarian-born engineer and physicist Theodore von Kármán, and the two young lecturers became collaborators.
Their question was simple to state. How do the atoms in a solid crystal move, and how does that movement determine how the material stores heat? In 1912, newly on the Göttingen teaching staff, Born began a research project with von Kármán to find out.
They treated a crystal as a regular lattice of atoms, each linked to its neighbours, and identified its degrees of freedom with the normal modes of vibration of the whole body. Using three-dimensional Fourier analysis and periodic boundary conditions, a mathematical device now known as the Born–von Kármán boundary condition, they could calculate how a solid's heat capacity changes with temperature. By the end of 1913 Born had published three papers with von Kármán on the subject, and the work laid the foundations of lattice dynamics.
Born expanded the research into a book, Dynamik der Kristallgitter, published in 1915. Arnold Sommerfeld then asked him to write a major article on it for the fifth volume of the Mathematical Encyclopedia, finished in 1922 and later revised as Atomic Theory of Solid States. Born even used matrices in this crystal work in 1921, experience that helped him a few years later when he recognised the mathematics of Heisenberg's quantum mechanics.
Crystals remained a lifelong interest. In exile at Edinburgh, Born wrote with the Chinese physicist Kun Huang the Dynamical Theory of Crystal Lattices, published by Oxford's Clarendon Press in 1954, which became a classic of solid-state physics. Enrico Fermi and James Franck nominated him for the Nobel Prize in 1947 and 1948 for his work on crystal lattices.
Lattice dynamics is now a cornerstone of solid-state physics. The collective vibrations Born and von Kármán described help explain how materials store and carry heat and sound, and their methods remain part of how physicists model solids, from semiconductors to new materials.
Why it matters
Lattice dynamics underpins the modern understanding of heat, sound and electrical behaviour in solids, from semiconductors to new materials.
About Max Born
Physicist who co-founded quantum mechanics and gave the wave function its probability meaning; dismissed from Göttingen by the Nazis in 1933, he won the Nobel Prize in exile in 1954.
More about Max Born
- Max Born built a home for refugee scientists in EdinburghDriven out of Germany in 1933, Max Born became Tait Professor at Edinburgh in 1936 and built a research group made up mostly of refugees from Europe.
- Max Born trained a generation of great physicistsAt Göttingen in the 1920s Max Born supervised Oppenheimer, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Max Delbrück and others, while Pauli, Heisenberg, Fermi and Wigner served as his assistants.
- The Born–Haber cycle is still taught to chemistsA chance meeting between Max Born and Fritz Haber around 1918 produced the Born–Haber cycle, a method chemistry students still use to analyse ionic compounds.
- Max Born found quantum mechanics' central equationIn 1925 Max Born recognised Heisenberg's new physics as matrix algebra and found its key law, the commutation relation now carved on his gravestone.
- Max Born showed quantum waves give probabilitiesIn 1926 Max Born proposed that the quantum wave function gives the probability of finding a particle, the Born rule, winning a share of the 1954 Nobel Prize.
- Max Born co-wrote the classic book on opticsMax Born and Emil Wolf wrote Principles of Optics, published in 1959, which became a standard reference on the physics of light for generations of scientists.
- Max Born rallied Nobel laureates against nuclear warIn 1955 Max Born and Otto Hahn initiated the Mainau Declaration, in which Nobel laureates warned against nuclear weapons; within a year 52 laureates had signed.
Sources
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.