Max Born

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.

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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.