- Person
- Max Born
- Lived
- 1882–1970
- Field
- Quantum mechanics
- From
- German-British
The story
After the First World War, Max Born held professorships in Berlin, where he formed a lifelong friendship with Albert Einstein, and in Frankfurt. In 1921 the University of Göttingen invited him back as director of its Institute of Theoretical Physics. Einstein told him that theoretical physics would flourish wherever he went, since there was no other Born in Germany. In negotiating the post, Born arranged for his friend James Franck to receive a second chair, in experimental physics, so that theory and experiment could advance side by side.
In twelve years, from 1921 to 1933, Born and Franck built Göttingen into one of the world's foremost centres for physics. It was there, in 1925 and 1926, that Born, Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan created matrix mechanics and Born gave the wave function its statistical meaning; Born also coined the term quantum mechanics.
Born had a gift for spotting talent. Among those who earned doctorates under him were Max Delbrück, Siegfried Flügge, Friedrich Hund, Pascual Jordan, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Lothar Nordheim, Robert Oppenheimer and Victor Weisskopf. His assistants included Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Gerhard Herzberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Léon Rosenfeld, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, and Walter Heitler completed his habilitation under him in 1929. Delbrück and Goeppert Mayer later won Nobel Prizes, as did Fermi, Heisenberg, Herzberg, Pauli and Wigner.
His biographer wrote that Born let his superstars stretch past him, while patiently giving less gifted students respectable, achievable assignments. Born also worked closely with experimentalists such as Franck, and he was remembered by colleagues and pupils for the warmth and directness of his personality.
The golden age ended in 1933, when Born was suspended under Nazi racial laws and many of his circle were forced to leave Germany. Yet the scattering spread his influence. His former students and assistants went on to lead research in the United States, Britain, Canada and elsewhere, in fields ranging from nuclear physics and spectroscopy to molecular biology.
Few teachers in the history of science have trained so many future leaders, and Born's Göttingen remains a model of how a generous, collaborative institute can shape an entire field.
Why it matters
Born's students and assistants went on to shape quantum physics, chemistry, molecular biology and nuclear science worldwide.
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 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.
- 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.