Background

Max Born was born on December 11, 1882, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), to Gustav Born and Margarethe Kaufman. Born had a younger sister named Käthe. His father, professor of anatomy at the local university, advised his son "never to specialize." Max Born was to remain true to this ideal in that, throughout his life, he maintained an active interest in art, philosophy, and literature.

Education

At first, Max Born was considered too frail to attend public school, so he was tutored at home before being allowed to attend the König Wilhelm Gymnasium in Breslau.

Afterward, Born took courses on a variety of science, philosophy, logic, and math subjects at Breslau University from 1901-1902, following his father’s advice to not specialize in a subject too soon at college. He also attended the Universities of Heidelberg, Zürich, and Göttingen.

Peers at Breslau University had told Born about three mathematics professors at Göttingen - Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski. Born went out of favor with Klein due to his irregular attendance at classes, though he subsequently impressed Klein by solving a problem on elastic stability at a seminar without reading the literature. Klein then invited Born to enter a university prize competition with the same problem in mind. Born, however, did not initially take part, offending Klein again.

Born changed his mind and later entered, winning the University of Breslau’s Philosophy Faculty Prize for his work on elasticity and obtaining a Doctor of Philosophy degree in mathematics on the subject in 1906 under his doctoral advisor Carl Runge.

Born subsequently went to Cambridge University for about six months, attending lectures by J. J. Thomson and Joseph Larmor.

Career

During the years 1908-1909, Max Born worked with the physicists Lummer and Pringsheim, and also studied the theory of relativity. On the strength of one of his papers, Minkowski invited his collaboration at Göttingen but soon after his return there, in the winter of 1909, Minkowski died. He had then the task of sifting Minkowski’s literary works in the field of physics and of publishing some uncompleted papers. Soon he became an academic lecturer at Göttingen in recognition of his work on the relativistic electron. He accepted Michelson’s invitation to lecture on relativity in Chicago (1912) and while there he did some experiments with the Michelson grating spectrograph.

An appointment as a professor (extraordinarius) to assist Max Planck at Berlin University came to Born in 1915 but he had to join the German Armed Forces. In a scientific office of the army, he worked on the theory of sound ranging. He found time also to study the theory of crystals and published his first book, Dynamik der Kristallgitter (Dynamics of Crystal Lattices), which summarized a series of investigations he had started at Göttingen.

At the conclusion of the First World War, in 1919, Born was appointed Professor at the University of Frankfurt-on-Main, where a laboratory was put at his disposal. His assistant was Otto Stern, and the first of the latter’s well-known experiments, which later were rewarded with a Nobel Prize, originated there.

Max Born went to Göttingen as Professor in 1921, at the same time as James Franck, and he remained there for twelve years, interrupted only by a trip to America in 1925. During these years the Professor’s most important works were created; first a modernized version of his book on crystals, and numerous investigations by him and his pupils on crystal lattices, followed by a series of studies on the quantum theory. Among his collaborators at this time were many physicists, later to become well-known, such as Pauli, Heisenberg, Jordan, Fermi, Dirac, Hund, Hylleraas, Weisskopf, Oppenheimer, Joseph Mayer, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer. During the years 1925 and 1926, he published, with Heisenberg and Jordan, investigations on the principles of quantum mechanics (matrix mechanics) and soon after this, his studies on the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics.

As were so many other German scientists, he was forced to emigrate in 1933 and was invited to Cambridge, where he taught for three years as Stokes Lecturer. His main sphere of work during this period was in the field of nonlinear electrodynamics, which he developed in collaboration with Infeld.

During the winter of 1935-1936 Born spent six months in Bangalore at the Indian Institute of Science, where he worked with Sir C.V. Raman and his pupils. In 1936 he was appointed Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy in Edinburgh, where he worked until his retirement in 1953.

Born was chagrined that his papers on the probability concept were not at first adequately acknowledged. However, in Copenhagen (the other leading center of theoretical physics between the world wars), Niels Bohr considered it an obvious development of formalism, saying, "We had never dreamt that it could be otherwise," illustrating how the probability interpretation is a prime example of an idea that is initially perceived only by a tremendous leap of the imagination but in retrospect is so obvious.

Following his retirement to Heidelberg, he became increasingly concerned about the ethical issues that arose out of scientific progress. He believed that no scientist could remain morally neutral with respect to the consequences of his work, no matter how basic his research or how ivoried his tower. Appalled by the spiraling number of military applications of the science that he had helped create, he felt a crushing responsibility and devoted his final years to writing and speaking about the "social, economic and political consequences of science, primarily the atom bomb, but also other pathological symptoms of our scientific age, like rocket research, space travel, overpopulation, and so on." He described the space program as a manifestation of "the crippled value system of the modern technological age."

Achievements

• Max Born was a German physicist who played a vital role in the evolution of quantum mechanics. His theoretical work in solid-state physics and optics is also considered very influential.
  
  Born shared the 1954 Nobel Prize for Physics with Walther Bothe for his statistical interpretation of the quantum theory.
  
  In 1953 he was made an honorary citizen of the town of Göttingen.
  
  Max Born had received honorary doctorates from Bristol, Bordeaux, Oxford, Freiburg/Breisgau, Edinburgh, Oslo, Brussels Universities, Humboldt University Berlin, and Technical University Stuttgart.

Works

More photos

• book

  • My Life & My Views

    (The reader of this book is introduced by Max Born to his ...)

    1968
  • Probleme der Atomdynamik: Erster Teil: Die Struktur des Atoms 1926
  • Optik: Ein Lehrbuch Der Elektromagnetischen Lichttheorie
  • Einstein's Theory of Relativity 1920

Politics

In 2011, Cambridge University unveiled a 1935 letter from Hitler himself expelling Born, the "father of quantum mechanics" from his post at Göttingen University.

Views

Max Born was a highly successful theoretical physicist who made brilliant contributions in the areas of physics and optics. He was appointed the Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Göttingen in 1921, where he established an authoritative school for atomic and quantum physics.

Born also worked with Werner Heisenberg for a while; Heisenberg discovered the "arrays of numbers" in 1925 that could be employed to prepare the first in-depth quantum theory. Born was more proficient in mathematics than Heisenberg and he found out that these "arrays" were widely known in mathematics as matrices. Around 1926, Born and his assistant formulated a full explanation of the new theory.

Perhaps Born’s most influential contribution to quantum theory was his concept that the wave-function could only be employed to predict the probabilities of different results being concluded in measurements; more precisely, that the square of the wave-function symbolizes a probability density. The concept was termed as the statistical interpretation of the quantum theory.

Quotations: "The belief that there is only one truth, and that oneself is in possession of it, is the root of all evil in the world."

"I am now convinced that theoretical physics is actually philosophy."

"Intellect distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless."

Membership

Max Born was awarded fellowships of many academies - Göttingen, Moscow, Berlin, Bangalore, Bucharest, Edinburgh, London, Lima, Dublin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Washington, and Boston.

• 

  Royal Society , United Kingdom

  1939

• Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities , Germany

Personality

Born was one of the few leading atomic physicists of the day who had the moral resolution to refuse all involvement with the development of the atom bomb.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Born, in holding that the basis of the material world was the purely random behaviour of the constituent particles of atoms, shared the majority viewpoint among quantum scientists; yet Einstein persisted in thinking that every event must have its cause, and searched constantly for a deeper explanation which might bring order into the seemingly chaotic subatomic world." - German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg.

Connections

The year 1913 saw Born's marriage to Hedwig, née Ehrenberg. They had three children: Irene, Gritli, and Gustav.

Father:

Gustav Born

Mother:

Margarete (Gretchen) Kaufmann

Spouse:

Hedwig Ehrenberg

(1891-1972)

Sister:

Käthe Born

Son:

Gustav Victor Rudolf Born

granddaughter :

Olivia Newton-John

Daughter:

Irene Born

(1914-2003)

Daughter:

Gritli Born

Friend:

Albert Einstein

colleague:

Walther Bothe

colleague:

Enrico Fermi

colleague:

Maria Goeppert Mayer

colleague:

Otto Stern

colleague:

Hugo Dingler

colleague:

Karl Schwarzschild

colleague:

Max Delbruck

colleague:

Walter Elsasser

colleague:

Friedrich Hermann Hund

colleague:

Julius Oppenheimer

Acquaintance:

Linus Pauling

colleague:

Niels Bohr

colleague:

James Franck

References

• The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born
  2005