Max Born

• 1. Early Academic Foundations

  ›

  Max Born entered the University of Göttingen in April 1904, stepping into a world dominated by three renowned mathematicians. He found Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski waiting to shape his intellectual future. Within days of his arrival, he formed close ties with Hilbert and Minkowski. Hilbert identified him as having exceptional abilities and selected him as the lecture scribe for his mathematics reading room. This role put Born into regular contact with the great man who would become his mentor. Minkowski invited him to Sunday dinners at his household after an introduction through Born's stepmother Bertha Lipstein. Their collaboration on special relativity made good progress until Minkowski died suddenly of appendicitis on the 12th of January 1909. Born presented their results at a meeting of the Göttingen Mathematics Society but was publicly challenged by Felix Klein and Max Abraham. They rejected relativity, forcing him to terminate the lecture. David Hilbert and Carl Runge later convinced him to give the lecture again without interruption. Woldemar Voigt offered to sponsor his habilitation thesis, which he published as Die Theorie des starren Elektrons in der Kinematik des Relativitätsprinzips. The work introduced the concept of Born rigidity.

• 2. The Matrix Mechanics Revolution

  ›

  On the 9th of July 1925, Werner Heisenberg gave Max Born a paper titled Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen. Heisenberg had formulated quantum theory using parameters like transition probabilities instead of concrete electron orbits. Born recognized the formulation could be transcribed into the systematic language of matrices. Pascual Jordan helped him immediately make a transcription and extension of the work. They submitted their results for publication just 60 days after Heisenberg's original paper. A follow-on paper was submitted before the end of the year by all three authors. The result included an equation where p and q were matrices for location and momentum. The left hand side of the equation was not zero because matrix multiplication is not commutative. This formulation established that all elements not on the diagonal of the matrix were zero. Born considered this paper with Jordan to contain the most important principles of quantum mechanics including its extension to electrodynamics. The paper put Heisenberg's approach on a solid mathematical basis. Matrices were seldom used by physicists until then, belonging only to pure mathematics. Gustav Mie had used them in a paper on electrodynamics in 1912, but the algebra did not enter the picture as it did here.

• 3. Statistical Interpretation And Nobel Recognition

  ›

  In July 1926, Max Born published the now-standard interpretation of the probability density function for ψ*ψ in the Schrödinger equation. He formulated this statistical interpretation alone while other physicists looked at wave mechanics. Erwin Schrödinger offered deterministic classical physics possibilities that ran counter to experimental facts. Einstein wrote to Born on the 4th of December 1926 making his famous remark about God playing dice. Heisenberg won the 1932 Prize alone for creating quantum mechanics while Schrödinger and Dirac shared the 1933 Prize. Born received a letter from Heisenberg on the 25th of November 1933 stating he felt bad conscience for winning alone. Heisenberg said Born and Jordan's contribution could not be changed by outside decisions. In October 1954, Born received word that he was being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited him for fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction. He shared the prize with Walther Bothe. Franck and Fermi had nominated him in 1947 and 1948 for work on crystal lattices. Over the years he had also been nominated for solid-state physics and quantum mechanics.

• 4. Displacement By The Nazi Regime

  ›

  In January 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. Born became one of six Jewish professors at Göttingen suspended with pay in May. James Franck had already resigned before the suspension. Born began looking for new jobs writing to Maria Goeppert Mayer at Johns Hopkins University and Rudi Ladenburg at Princeton University. He accepted an offer from St John's College Cambridge where he wrote Atomic Physics as a standard textbook. His family settled into life in England while his daughters Irene and Gritli became engaged to Welshman Brinley Newton-John and Englishman Maurice Pryce respectively. Born's position at Cambridge remained temporary until his tenure at Göttingen terminated in May 1935. He therefore accepted an offer from C. V. Raman to go to Bangalore in 1935. The Indian Institute of Science did not create an additional chair for him. In November 1935, the Born family had their German citizenship revoked rendering them stateless. A few weeks later Goettingen cancelled Born's doctorate. Charles Galton Darwin asked if he would consider becoming Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh which he promptly accepted assuming the chair in October 1936.