- Person
- Max Born
- Lived
- 1882–1970
- Field
- Quantum mechanics
- From
- German-British
The story
In January 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany. Max Born, who had been born into a Jewish family in Breslau, had been baptised a Lutheran in 1914, but under Nazi racial laws he was classed as a Jew. In May 1933 he became one of six Jewish professors at Göttingen suspended from their posts, ending twelve years in which he and James Franck had made the university one of the world's foremost centres for physics.
Born left Germany and, after a short stay in northern Italy, accepted a temporary post at Cambridge, where he wrote the popular book The Restless Universe and the textbook Atomic Physics. In 1935 C. V. Raman invited him to the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. That November the Nazi regime stripped the Born family of German citizenship, leaving them stateless, and Göttingen cancelled his doctorate. Then Charles Galton Darwin asked whether he would succeed him as Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.
Born accepted at once and took up the chair in October 1936. He remained until he retired in the early 1950s. In Edinburgh he promoted the teaching of mathematical physics and introduced a continental-style research group which, MacTutor notes, was made up mostly of refugees from Europe; his assistants included Ernst Walter Kellermann. One research student recalled that Born began each morning by visiting every student to ask about progress and offer advice, sometimes handing over pages of calculations he had done himself the day before.
With his wife Hedi he also gave help and advice to others forced to leave Germany and Austria. In 1939 he got as many of his remaining friends and relatives out of Germany as he could, including his sister Käthe, while Hedi ran a bureau placing young Jewish women in jobs. Born became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1937 and of the Royal Society in 1939, and he became a British subject on 31 August 1939, the day before the Second World War broke out.
Edinburgh became the base for much of his later work, including the Dynamical Theory of Crystal Lattices and the planning of Principles of Optics. In 1950 the Royal Society awarded him its Hughes Medal, and in 1954 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. His Edinburgh school showed how a university that welcomed exiles could gain a lasting scientific community in return.
Why it matters
Born's Edinburgh school gave displaced scientists a place to continue their work and trained a new generation of British physicists.
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 founded the physics of vibrating crystalsIn 1912 Max Born and Theodore von Kármán founded lattice dynamics, explaining how atomic vibrations set a solid's properties; Born later wrote the classic text on it.
- 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.