Born, Max

ACHIEVEMENT(S): Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954 (with Walther Bothe) for

statistical formulation of the behavior of subatomic particles

NICKNAME/ALIAS: None

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: December 11,1882, Breslau, Silesia, Prussia [now

Wroclaw, Poland]

DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: January 5, 1970, Gottingen, Germany. Aged 87

DISCIPLINE: Theoretical physics

FIELD: Physics

LANGUAGE: German, English

PARENTS: Gustav Born; Margarete Kaufmann

SIBLINGS: None

SPOUSE: Hedwig Ehrenberg

CHILDREN: Irene; Margaret; Gustav

EDUCATION: Kaiser Wilhelm Gymnasium, Breslau; University of Breslau;

University of Gottingen

MAJOR WORK: “Quantenmechanik der Stossvorgange"

LIFE AND TIMES:

As a child, Born met important scientific figures, including German bacteriologist Ehrlich*. In 1907 he went to Cambridge University to study electrons under British physicist J.J. Thomson*. In 1908, back in Breslau, Born became acquainted with the work of German physicist Einstein* and his theory of

relativity, which had been published in 1905. Born developed a new and more accurate method of calculating an electron’s electromagnetic mass.

As a result, he was invited to Gottingen University, where he carried out a study of the heat capacity of solids, particularly crystals, with Hungarian aerodynamicist Karman*, which resulted in the Born-Karman theory of specific heats.

In 1912 he was invited to lecture on relativity at the University of Chicago in 1912. In 1915, he was offered the post of assistant professor at the University of Berlin to relieve German physicist Planck* of his lecturing duties.

In 1919, a year after World War I, Born moved to the University of Frankfurt. He had been asked by Laue*, professor of physics, to exchange teaching positions so that von Laue could work with Planck in Berlin. At Frankfurt, Born carried out a series of experiments on the mean free path of gas molecules, and from 1919 to 1921, became an expert on the physics of crystals.

Following a meeting with German scientist Fritz Haber who developed the Haber process for the synthesis of ammonia, Born realized that little was known about the calculation of chemical energies. Haber encouraged Born to apply his work on the lattice energies of crystals (the energy given out when gaseous ions are brought together to form a solid crystal lattice) to the formation of alkali metal chlorides.

From this work, Born determined the energies involved in lattice formation, from which the properties of crystals may be derived, and in this way laid one of the foundations of solid-state physics.

In 1921, Born was appointed director of the Physical Institute at Gottingen University, and the next 12 years constituted his most productive period. He soon became interested in quantum mechanics, in particular the electronic structure of atoms. His interest was sparked by Danish physicist Bohr*, the architect of modern atomic theory, who, in 1922, had presented a series of lectures at Gottingen in which he outlined his “correspondence principle” and suggested that a new quantum theory could be developed in terms of classical physics.

Challenged by Bohr’s ideas, Born set out to derive a new formulation of physical laws using what he called "quantum mechanics". A breakthrough in this effort came in 1925, when one of Born’s assistants, the 24-year old Heisenberg*, showed him a paper he wrote on this subject.

Heisenberg had begun with the premise that only observable quantities should be used in the development of theoretical principles, and from this assumption, he derived a new mathematical approach, which turned out to be the first laws of a new quantum theory.

Born realized that the mathematical system described by Heisenberg was essentially the same as that of matrix algebra. Since Heisenberg had gone on vacation after giving Born his paper, Born asked another assistant, Pascual Jordan, to help him develop and refine the ideas in Heisenberg’s paper.

This led to the publication, in 1925, of a series of three papers: Heisenberg’s original; a joint paper by Born and Jordan building on Heisenberg’s paper; and a final paper, co-authored by all three, that outlined the fundamentals of what was later to become known as “matrix mechanics”, a system that accounted mathematically for the position of the electron in the atom.

This new system was at first applied to only the simplest cases, but by the fall of 1925, Pauli* had calculated a new method for computing the stationary states of atoms.

In the winter of 1925-26, six months after Wiener* had lectured at Gottingen, Born visited the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a guest lecturer and began a highly productive collaboration with Wiener, who returned to work at Gottingen in the summer of 1926.

However, that same year, an entirely different approach to the treatment of quantum physics was proposed by Austrian physicist Schrodinger*. His thesis became known as “wave mechanics”. Eventually, Schrodinger was able to prove that these two mathematical formulations -- matrix mechanics and wave mechanics -- far from being incompatible, were entirely consistent with each other.

For most physicists, Schrodinger’s wave mechanics was easier to use and understand than matrix mechanics, and wave mechanics quickly became the tool used to interpret particle phenomena. However, wave mechanics was an entirely mathematical analysis of particle properties and behavior, based on a few fundamental properties of matter, and had no apparent physical meaning. One major problem was how to interpret the wave function, which was at the heart of wave mechanics.

In 1926, Born proposed a solution. Using Schrodinger’s method of treating atomic scattering processes, Born suggested that the statistics of the scattering of a particle could be computed by regarding the square of the wave function as the probability of finding a particle at any point along the wave. (i.e. if one imagines the particle being carried along on the wave, the square of the amplitude of the wave at any particular point is equal to the likelihood of finding the particle at that location).

Thus, Born complemented the computational schema of the quantum theory with precise physical representations, as explained in his "Quantenmechanik der Stossvorgange" (1926). For this work, as well as for his earlier studies on quantum mechanics, Born shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in physics with Walther Bothe. Young physicists clamored to work with him.

His students and associates at Gottingen included Max Delbruck, Fermi*, Werner Heisenberg, Theodore von Karman, von Neumann*, Oppenheimer*, Wolfgang Pauli, Teller*, and Norbert Wiener.

In April 1933 he was fired as a result of Hitler’s* new law directed against Jewish civil servants, and in May left Germany. He spent several months in the Italian Tyrol, and then in June, accepted an invitation by English physicist Patrick M. Blackett to take up a Stokes Lectureship in applied mechanics at Cambridge University. Here, Born worked on problems of nonlinear electrodynamics and wrote two successful books, “Atomic Physics” (1935) and “The Restless Universe” (1935).

He was then invited to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland to become Professor of Natural Philosophy, where he remained until his retirement in 1953.

In Edinburgh, Born became the charismatic leader of a circle of talented students, most notably Fuchs* who later became infamous as an "atom spy".

ASSESSMENT: Renowned for pioneering quantum mechanics: the mathematical explanation of the behavior of an electron in an atom.

EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None

ONELINER: Max Born, major figure in quantum physics

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

EB, DNB

McMurray, Emily J. (ed), Notable Twentieth Century Scientists, , New York & London: Gale Research Inc., 1995

Abbot, David (ed.), Physicists: The Biographical Dictionary of Scientists London: Blond Educational, 1984