- Person
- Max Born
- Lived
- 1882–1970
- Field
- Quantum mechanics
- From
- German-British
The story
Max Born had a lifelong talent for writing books that organised whole fields. In 1933, just as he was being forced out of Germany, Springer published his book Optik, which covered every optical phenomenon that could be explained by classical physics and James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism.
During the Second World War the book was reproduced and sold widely in the United States under the authority of the Office of Alien Property, without any payment to Born, even though he had become a British subject before the war began. After a long campaign, his rights were restored and he received back royalties.
In 1950, with encouragement from Sir Edward Appleton, principal of the University of Edinburgh, Born decided to produce an updated English version. He was partly motivated by money: he had not worked at Edinburgh long enough to earn a good pension and received none from Germany. Optics had advanced so much since 1933 that a new book was needed rather than a translation. Born first approached Dennis Gabor, the inventor of holography, who later withdrew for lack of time, and invited the young physicist Emil Wolf to contribute. In 1951 Wolf began working as Born's assistant on the project, and he became co-author, writing several chapters and editing contributions from specialists.
The authors hoped to finish by the end of 1951, but the book grew into a massive and rigorous account of the propagation, interference and diffraction of light. Principles of Optics: Electromagnetic Theory of Propagation, Interference and Diffraction of Light was finally published by Pergamon Press in December 1959.
The timing was fortunate. The laser was invented in 1960, a year later, opening entirely new fields of optics, and the book's thorough treatment of classical optics became essential background for the researchers who explored them. It went through six editions with Pergamon, was reprinted many times, and moved to Cambridge University Press, which published an expanded seventh edition in 1999 with new material on topics such as computerised tomography and the scattering of light. A 60th anniversary edition appeared in 2019.
Still known simply as Born and Wolf, it is considered a classic and one of the most influential optics books of the twentieth century, a standard reference for students and researchers more than six decades after it first appeared.
Why it matters
Born and Wolf has guided the scientists and engineers behind lasers, fibre optics, microscopes and telescopes.
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 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
- Max Born Wikipedia
- Principles of Optics 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.