- Person
- Max Born
- Lived
- 1882–1970
- Field
- Quantum mechanics
- From
- German-British
The story
After the Second World War, Max Born became one of the most persistent scientific voices warning about nuclear weapons. He had refused to take part in weapons research himself. In 1954, the year he retired to Bad Pyrmont in West Germany, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, and in retirement he turned increasingly to the impact of science on human affairs. In his Nobel lecture he warned that the belief in a single truth, and in being its possessor, was the root cause of evil in the world.
Each summer Nobel laureates gathered at Lindau, on Lake Constance, to meet young scientists, and the last day of the meeting was traditionally held on nearby Mainau Island. In 1955, together with the chemist Otto Hahn, Born initiated and drafted an appeal against the use of nuclear weapons. It was circulated at the fifth Lindau meeting, held from 11 to 15 July 1955, and presented on Mainau on the final day.
Written on behalf of scientists of different countries, creeds and political persuasions, bound together only by the Nobel Prize, the declaration warned that science was giving humanity the means to destroy itself, and that radioactive contamination from total war could annihilate whole peoples, neutrals as well as combatants. It argued that it was a delusion to believe that fear of these weapons could keep the peace for long, and it concluded that all nations must decide to renounce force as a final resort, and that if they were not prepared to do so, they would cease to exist.
It was first signed by 18 Nobel laureates, among them Werner Heisenberg, Arthur Compton, Hideki Yukawa, Frederick Soddy and Hermann Staudinger, and within a year the number of supporters had risen to 52. The same year Born also signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, led by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, calling for the peaceful settlement of disputes in the nuclear age. Two years later he joined the Göttingen Eighteen in refusing to help arm West Germany with nuclear weapons.
The declaration began a tradition. In 2015 laureates at Lindau issued a second Mainau Declaration, on climate change, and in 2024 a third, again on nuclear weapons, signed by 30 laureates and supported by more than 600 Lindau alumni.
Why it matters
The Mainau Declaration added the moral authority of the world's leading scientists to the movement against nuclear war, and began a tradition laureates continue today.
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.
- 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.
Sources
- Mainau Declaration Wikipedia
- Max Born Wikipedia
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.