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

" '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).

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).

"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).

"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).

"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).

"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).

"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).

"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).

"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).

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.