Concept
Max Born
Overview
Max Born (German: [ˈmaks ˈbɔʁn] ; 11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German–British theoretical physicist who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics, and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. He shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics with Walther Bothe "for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction."
Born entered the University of Göttingen in 1904, where he met the three renowned mathematicians Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the subject of the stability of elastic wires and tapes, winning the university's Philosophy Faculty Prize. In 1905, he began researching special relativity with Minkowski, and subsequently wrote his habilitation thesis on the Thomson model of the atom. A chance meeting with Fritz Haber in Berlin in 1918 led to discussion of how an ionic compound is formed when a metal reacts with a halogen, which is now known as the Born–Haber cycle.
During World War I, Born was originally placed as a radio operator, but his specialist knowledge led to his being moved to research duties on sound ranging. In 1921 Born returned to Göttingen, where he arranged another chair for his long-time friend and colleague James Franck. Under Born, Göttingen became one of the world's foremost centres for physics. In 1925, Born and Werner Heisenberg formulated the matrix mechanics representation of quantum mechanics. The following year, he formulated the now-standard interpretation of the probability density function for ψ*ψ in the Schrödinger equation, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1954.
His influence extended far beyond his own research: Max Delbrück, Siegfried Flügge, Friedrich Hund, Pascual Jordan, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Lothar Nordheim, Robert Oppenheimer, and Victor Weisskopf all received their Ph.D. degrees under Born at Göttingen, and his assistants included Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Gerhard Herzberg, Friedrich Hund, Wolfgang Pauli, Léon Rosenfeld, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner.
In January 1933, when the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, Born, who was born into a Jewish family, was suspended from his professorship at the University of Göttingen. He emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he took a job at St John's College, Cambridge, and wrote a popular science book, The Restless Universe, as well as Atomic Physics, which soon became a standard textbook. In October 1936, he was appointed Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where, working with German-born assistants E. Walter Kellermann and Klaus Fuchs, he continued his research into physics. He became a naturalised British subject on 31 August 1939, one day before the German invasion of Poland that started World War II in Europe. He remained in Edinburgh until 1952, when he retired to Bad Pyrmont, West Germany, and died in a hospital in Göttingen on 5 January 1970.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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The three principal sources of our knowledge concerning atoms have been the light they emit, X-rays and radio-activity. As everyone knows, when the light emitted by a glowing gas is passed through a prism, it is found to consist of well-defined lines of different colours, which are characteristic for each element, and constitute what is called its “spectrum”. The spectrum extends beyond the range of visible light…
Bertrand Russell, Philosophy
States what Max Born is.
There is still a resource; the ultimate elements of bodies are electrons, some charged negatively, the others charged positively. The negative electrons have no mass, this is understood; but the positive electrons, from the little we know of them, seem much greater. Perhaps they have, besides their electrodynamic mass, a true mechanical mass.
Henri Poincaré, The Foundations of Science
States what Max Born is.
Every special kind of atom can be made to oscillate by a special order of ethereal waves, which are absorbed in producing its oscillations; and can by its oscillations generate this same order of ethereal waves. Whence it appears that immense as is the difference in density between ether and ponderable matter, the waves of the one can set the atoms of the other in motion, when the successive impacts of the waves are…
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, Volume 1
Close in meaning to Max Born; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Max Born
Related ideas
- Heidelberg University
- Eugene Wigner
- Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society
- Macmillan Publishers
- Wave function
- Königsberg
- University of Göttingen
- Momentum
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Niels Bohr
- Nazi Party
- Optics
- Physicist
- Göttingen
- Lutheranism
- University of Wisconsin–Madison
- University of Edinburgh
- Princeton University
- Applied mathematics
- Quantum mechanics
- Jews
- Special relativity
- Silesia
- World War II
Place in the tradition
Part of Anaximander.