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Greenspan, Nancy Thorndike. The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born. Basic Books, 2005.

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After embarrassing himself on his birthday, the experience affected him for the rest of his life, teaching him to be more reserved.

"It was the first experience which taught me to be reserved. Many others followed" (5).

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Born's friend made him carry a gun for hunting despite Born being a pacifist himself, then during the hunt they encountered a hare. Born shot in the direction it came from, and heard it scream, to which it traumatized him into never touching a gun again.

" 'I do not know whether it was that hare or another animal, but I had certainly hit some living being, and there was no way to find it in the woods and end its pain" (10).

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Max Born (born Dec. 11, 1882, Breslau, Ger. [now Wrocław, Pol.]-died Jan. 5, 1970, Göttingen, W.Ger.) German physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954 with Walther Bothe for his probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Born came from an upper-middle-class, assimilated, Jewish family. At first he 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. Thereafter he continued his studies in physics and mathematics at universities in Breslau, Heidelberg, Zürich, and Göttingen. At the University of Göttingen he wrote his dissertation (1906), on the stability of elastic wires and tapes, under the direction of the mathematician Felix Klein, for which he was awarded a doctorate in 1907.

After brief service in the army and a stay at the University of Cambridge, where he worked with physicists Joseph Larmor and J.J. Thomson, Born returned to Breslau for the academic year 1908-09 and began an extensive study of Albert Einstein's theory of special relativity. On the strength of his papers in this field, Born was invited back to Göttingen as an assistant to the mathematical physicist Hermann Minkowski. In 1912 Born met Hedwig Ehrenberg, whom he married a year later. Three children, two girls and a boy, were born from the union. It was a troubled relationship, and Born and his wife often lived apart.

In 1915 Born accepted a professorship to assist physicist Max Planck at the University of Berlin, but World War I intervened and he was drafted into the German army. Nonetheless, while an officer in the army, he found time to publish his first book, Dynamik der Kristallgitter (1915; Dynamics of Crystal Lattices).

In 1919 Born was appointed to a full professorship at the University of Frankfurt am Main, and in 1921 he accepted the position of professor of theoretical physics at the University of Göttingen. James Franck had been appointed professor of experimental physics at Göttingen the previous year. The two of them made the University of Göttingen one of the most important centres for the study of atomic and molecular phenomena. A measure of Born's influence can be gauged by the students and assistants who came to work with him-among them, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Enrico Fermi, Fritz London, P.A.M. Dirac, Victor Weisskopf, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Walter Heitler, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer.

The Göttingen years were Born's most creative and seminal. In 1912 Born and Hungarian engineer Theodore von Karman formulated the dynamics of a crystal lattice, which incorporated the symmetry properties of the lattice, allowed the imposition of quantum rules, and permitted thermal properties of the crystal to be calculated. This work was elaborated when Born was in Göttingen, and it formed the basis of the modern theory of lattice dynamics.

In 1925 Heisenberg gave Born a copy of the manuscript of his first paper on quantum mechanics, and Born immediately recognized that the mathematical entities with which Heisenberg had represented the observable physical quantities of a particle-such as its position, momentum, and energy-were matrices. Joined by Heisenberg and Jordan, Born formulated all the essential aspects of quantum mechanics in its matrix version. A short time later, Erwin Schrödinger formulated a version of quantum mechanics based on his wave equation. It was soon proved that the two formulations were mathematically equivalent. What remained unclear was the meaning of the wave function that appeared in Schrödinger's equation. In 1926 Born submitted two papers in which he formulated the quantum mechanical description of collision processes and found that in the case of the scattering of a particle by a potential, the wave function at a particular spatiotemporal location should be interpreted as the probability amplitude of finding the particle at that specific space-time point. In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this work.

Born remained at Göttingen until April 1933, when all Jews were dismissed from their academic posts in Germany. Born and his family went to England, where he accepted a temporary lectureship at Cambridge. In 1936 he was appointed Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He became a British citizen in 1939 and remained at Edinburgh until his retirement in 1953. The next year, he and his wife moved to Bad Pyrmont, a small spa town near Göttingen.

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Max Born | Nobel Prize Winner, Quantum Mechanics Pioneer

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Max Born German physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954 with Walther Bothe for his probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics. Born came from an upper-middle-class, assimilated, Jewish family. At first he was considered too frail to attend public school, so he was tutored at

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Max Born wrote this book along with Kun Huang

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8 years after the discover of the first subatomic particle, the Electron, a lot of physicists didn't believes such particles existed, while some others believe it is a fundamental part of understanding the world. The discovery of electron's motion gave rise to electromagnetic fields, to which physicists believed something called an "ether" supported the EM-field by filling up the space.

The reason I'm mentioning ether is because it reminded me of gluons and how it basically acts as glue for quarks. I know quarks, electrons are quite different from each other, but hearing things like the ether I can't help but think of gluons. Unlike ether, gluons had their existence PROVEN in the 1980's.

"Physicists firmly believed that this field spread out through and was supported by the ether, an indetectable medium assumed to fill space" (32).

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#4  Ehrenfest's paradoxical conclusion to Born's article

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#4  Ehrenfest's paradoxical conclusion to Born's article

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Born wrote an article regarding relativity, to which Paul Ehrenfest, (a young physicist Born knew for a few days), received it positively. However, Ehrenfest saw that this article led to a paradox, and he wrote an article addressing it and coming up with an alternative explanation. That article then led to a controversy.

"Born's article on relativity, 'The Theory of Rigid Bodies in the Kinematics of the Relativity Principle', appeared in the August addition of the Annalen der Physik ... Initially, Ehrenfest responded positively to Born's article, writing to a friend, 'I began to read it last night - it is clear and elegant throughout - Minkowski + Born represent an enormous advance' ... But then Ehrenfest began to reconsider Born's new definition of rigidity, and in an article proposed an alternative but equivalent one. His article provoked a controversy that quickly overshadowed Born's general findings" (47 - 48).

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Fritz Haber, a chemist, asked Born if he wanted to work with him on chemical war instruments. But see, the problem is, it was past April 22. That date is a really important one, because that was the faithful day when Haber tested chlorine gas on french soldiers during trench warfare. Many people died, and many more had permanently damaged lungs for the rest of their life. Born didn't like what Haber did, and rejected his offer, calling it cowardly to use gas to kill enemies.

"Haber asked if he would like to work on his lab on chemical war instruments such as gas masks ... April 22 had already passed. On that day, French soldiers in trenches near Ypres, Belgium, curiously watched as a yellow-green cloud spread to them ... Five thousand soldiers died at Ypres that day and another ten thousand suffered with corroded lungs for the rest of their lives ... Born did not reject Habers offer immediately, but ultimately he did ... The letter with his response was very pointed, similar in spirit to later writings when he described poisen as a cowardly instrument of murder and not sanctioned as a war weapon" (69).

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Einstein got famous, Born is excited, but the physics community is still unsure about Einstein's kooky thinking just yet. Born held a few lectures on Einstein's theories at a university, raising money to allow his buddy, Stern, to finish his experiment. Born got so excited and interested in Stern's work, he did a related experimented with Fräulein Bormann about the measurement of a silver atoms free path to look at molecular collision cross sections. And this was his first and only experiment, and it was a success!

"In January 1920, for three consecutive Tuesday evenings, Born held lectures on general relativity in the large auditorium at the university. The admission he charged the general public raised almost 7,000 marks, enough 'to get the institute off the ground' and allow Stern to finish his experiment. Born became so enthused by Stern's work that he and Fräulein Bormann began a related project--- to measure the free path of silver atoms in order to look at molecular collision cross sections. It was Born's first and only successful experiment" (93).

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Born heard of a letter containing excited news about quantum theory. A very excited physicist indeed.

"A piece of news from Copenhagen made Born consider dropping everything. On February 21, Landé recieved a letter from Niels Bohr reporting that he had just derived the entire periodic system from quantum theory" (104).

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Born's students have become poverty-stricken due to inflation, so his students were too cold and hungry to continue studying effectively. Poor students, both literally AND metaphorically.

"Born was beset not only by the prospect of Pauli's departure but by an increasingly grim economic situation for his students and assistants ... But worsening inflation left his students poverty-stricken, too cold and hungry to study effectively" (111).

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Sooooo, the German government decided to print tons and tons of money. At the beginning of the war, it was 4 to 1. When Born went to itally, it went to 493 to 1. By January of 1923, it went up to 17792(!!!) to 1. And finally, 10 months later, it SKYROCKETTED to 4.2 TRILLION MARKS to 1 DOLLAR!!!! WHATTTTTT!?!??!?!?!?!

"The German government then printed money to continue paying qorkers, further inflating an already weak mark. At the beginning of the war, its exchange rate with the dollar had been 4 to 1, and in July 1922, when the Borns went to Itally, 493 to 1. By Januarry 1923, it had escalated to 17,792. Ten months later in November 1923, the rate would be 4.2 trillion marks to 1 dollar" (117).

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Born worked with Oppenheimer and together produced the paper "On the Quantum Theory of the Molecule", which produced a method called the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. Oppenheimer later said it was his idea, and wrote a 5 page article about. He showed it to Born, and Born was flabbergasted by the way Oppenheimer wrote it, and so Born rewrote it to be 20 pages long. However, Oppenheimer didn't like how lengthy Born's rewritten article was.

"Their major work together was the paper 'On the Quantum Theory of the Molecule' from which came the Born-Oppenheimer approximation---a method using perturbation theory to justify the assumption to fix the position of the massive nucleus when calculating the motion of the much lighter electrons. Oppenheimer later said that he came up with the idea, and after writing up a simple four- or five-page article, showed it to Born. Born, who was aghast at Oppenheimer's style, rewrote the article. In its final form with proper theorems, it comprised twenty-seven pages. Oppenheimer felt Born's lengthy treatment was unneeded and obscured the main ideas" (144).

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Born has been getting more sicker as time went on, that he needed to take a break for a few weeks. However, he realizes he would probably need more than a few weeks to recuperate. Unfortunately, the winter of 1928-1929 was extremely severe and so Born couldn't exactly go outside due to how frozen-over everywhere was. Eventually, Born started gaining a bit of strength and joined his patients in the lounge to which everyone was talking about support for Adolf Hitler. They talked of how all their problems are caused by the Jews. Born was SHOOKETH, quaking to his knees, that people would ever speak like this. The only highlight of Born's stay was a visit from Irene, but that's about it.

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Nazi numbers are growing, and Born's family is becoming more and more concerned and off-putted by this. Due to the "wicked" conditions present in Germany, Born talked to Ehrenfest about how the future looks dark and that him and his family would be packing up and moving to America one day.

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Born recieved an offer to teach at Cambridge University. He didn't really have an answer just yet, but he did spend like, six weeks there watching brilliant professors talk about science-y stuff. Apparently, according to Born, it was quite refreshing.

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Born took the offer to be a lecturer at Cambridge University, and found the work there to be light and refreshing. He even got the chance to dabble in theoretical physics and quantum theory, with the assistance of two of his students. He feels free from the pressures of Göttingen. One downside to this is the fact Born wasn't getting paid as much as he did back then, but that's okay, he's having fun! :3333

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Born and his family decided to visit Göttingen to meet with some relatives. This was during when the Nazi's were having a moment of relative peace to give foreign countries a good impression on them for the Olympics. Hedi, Born's wife, felt like "a foreign body" throughout her stay in Göttingen. Born saw a "new" Germany with many technological advancements like factories and modern roads. However, Born came across a newspaper called Der Stürmer, which shooked Born to his very core. It was to the point where he couldn't sleep at night. While everything in Germany is being toned down, it still has an oppressive atmosphere. With this, the family decided they should become british citizens as soon as possible, moving away from Germany to seek more peaceful lands with one other family member.

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Born and Hedi found out about the true extent of the horrors that went on in Germany, such as the concentration camps there and what transpired in such a place. Hedi thought it was maybe just a small group of criminals who've done this, thinking that German people were innocent, much to her shock. Many people of their family have died, and it struck the two like bricks. Born told his son that his family committed suicide rather than undergo the concentration camps. The reason he did this was to protect his song through lying. It's chilling to know that it's better telling a kid a lot of their family members committed suicide rather than get put through a concentration camp.

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Born woke up one morning confronted by many news reporters. Apparently a student of his, Klaus Fuchs, released atomic secrets during 1945 - 1947 to the Russians. There wasn't any concrete evidence that showed Fuchs did this, and without a statement from him, the British government wouldn't be able to arrest him. Born and his family didn't think Fuchs was guilty, because it would be odd for Fuchs to be entrusted to such top-secret work knowing about Fuchs' strong communistic conviction. March 1st, 1950, Fuchs was sentenced up to 14 years in prison, (but he got released after 9 years due to good behavior). Born met up with a few family members of Klaus, and they believed he did the right thing. That Klaus did what he did to stop any future wars; It was for the good of the people.

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March 6th, 1953, was the day Born gave his final lecture. He loses his sense of purpose after, but is eager to move and live quietly and peacefully for the rest of his life. Hedi was all the way in Germany organizing retirement plans. Everything is going well for the two of them. Suddenly, Herglotz died. Then, shortly after Hedi came home, she finds her husband grieving over the tremendous loss of Käthe. The two still talked of moving to Bad Pyrmont anyway, telling their friends about it, though packing up and moving was difficult. Hedi left for Germany earlier than Born; He stayed behind for six more weeks to take care of extra details.

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Hedi and Born were enjoying their quiet life, when suddenly a young swedish man, a journalist, came up to their doorstep. He whispered, "Nobel Prize," and Hedi freaked out. Born was overjoyed, but he was much more quiet about it. There was an influx of German and Swedish reporters everywhere, however the Borns chose not the reveal the grand news they recently recieved. Very wholesome moment :3

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Born spent the rest of his days translating German poetry written by Wilhelm Busch into English and writing philosophical articles. By the time Born turned 80, his healthy declined quickly. At his 87th birthday, he was bed-bound in a hospital in Göttingen. Born was visited by Irene, which she describes his face as "calm and noble".

Max Born died on the 5th of January, 1970, in Göttingen. Followed by Hedi two years later. Carved on their gravestone, there is the equation for the fundamental commutation law of quantum mechanics, first written down by Born in July 1925.