Max Born, the man Einstein turned to when in doubt about quantum mechanics
11 December 1882, Wroclaw (Kingdom of Prussia) - 5 January 1970, Göttingen (Germany)
He began his studies at the University of Wroclaw in 1901, and as the university system allowed students to exchange between universities, he spent some semesters at the University of Heidelberg (1902), the University of Zurich (1903) and the University of Götingen (1904).
At the latter, he met renowned mathematicians such as Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski who were quick to recognise Born's exceptional abilities. Hilbert selected him to write the lecture notes for the students' mathematics lecture hall. As a class scribe, the two became close, with Hilbert becoming Born's mentor and Born his assistant. In the case of Minowski, he not only had contact with him at the university but was an acquaintance of his family and had the opportunity to see him at family events as well.
The relationship with Felix Klein was more complicated from the start. Born attended a seminar on elasticity, led by Klein and professors of applied mathematics Carl Runge and Ludwig Prandtl, even though the subject was of no interest to him. Klein urged him to present a paper in which, using Hilbert's calculus of variations, he used a curved configuration of a wire with both ends fixed, showing that it would be more stable.
Klein was impressed and invited him to present a thesis on the subject of ‘Elastic Stability in a Plane and Space’, a subject dear to Klein's heart, which he had arranged as the subject of the prestigious annual Faculty of Philosophy Prize. Born declined the offer, as applied mathematics was not his preferred area of study, and Klein took great offense. It was known that Klein could hinder Born's career, so he was forced to submit a paper for the Prize. Klein refused to supervise it, and Born asked Carl Runge to help him as his supervisor.
Thereafter, he developed the equations for the stability conditions had an instrument built that could test his predictions experimentally, and produced the thesis proposed by Klien. He submitted it in 1906 and obtained his doctorate in mathematics magna cum laude.
Upon graduation, Born was forced to perform military service, which he had postponed while he was a student. He was conscripted into the German army and assigned to the Second Dragoon Guards of the ‘Empress Alexandra of Russia’, which was stationed in Berlin. His service was brief, as he was discharged prematurely after an asthma attack in January 1907.
He then travelled to England, where he was admitted to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and studied physics for six months at the Cavendish Laboratories with Joseph J. Thomson (discoverer of the electron), George Frederick Charles Searle, and Joseph Larmor.
On his return to Germany, he was reinstated by the army and served in the elite First Life Corpsmen ‘Grand Elector’ until he was medically discharged again after only six weeks' service.
He returned to Breslau, where he worked under the supervision of Otto Lummer and Ernst Pringsheim, hoping to complete his studies in physics. A minor accident during an experiment on Born's black body, which ended up flooding the laboratory through a broken cooling water hose, led Lummer to tell him that he would never become a physicist.
In 1905, Albert Einstein published his paper on special relativity. Born was intrigued and began to investigate the subject, discovering that Minkowski was also pursuing the same line of research. He wrote to him and showed him his results, and he urged him to return to Göttingen and finish his studies there. Born agreed. However, Minkowski died suddenly in 1909.
A few weeks later, Born tried to present his results at a meeting of the Göttingen Mathematical Society. He did not get very far before he was publicly challenged by Klein and Max Abraham, who rejected relativity and forced him to end the lecture. However, Hilbert and Runge were interested in Born's work and, after some discussions with Born, were convinced of the veracity of his results and persuaded him to give the lecture again. This time he was not interrupted.
He subsequently published his talk as a paper on ‘The rigid electron theory in the kinematics of the principle of relativity’ which introduced the concept of Born rigidity and received his PhD with his thesis based on Thomson's atomic model.
Possibly his most renowned contribution to quantum physics is his probabilistic interprestation of the Schrödinger wave function. According to it, the modulus squared of the amplitude of the Schrödinger wave function is equal to the probability density of state. For example, in the case of a wave function describing the position of an electron, the square of the amplitude will be equal to the probability of finding the electron at a given position.
By the end of 1913, Born had already published 27 papers, and in 1914, he received a letter from Max Planck offering him an extraordinary professorship in theoretical physics at the University of Berlin, which Max Von Laue had turned down.
In 1915 he arrived in Berlin in the midst of the First World War and joined the army's artillery research and development organisation. It was at this time that he formed a rare and close friendship with Albert Einstein that lasted for 40 years, although their views on science were totally irreconcilable. Einstein turned to him whenever he had doubts about quantum mechanics, and it was to him that he addressed his famous phrase: ‘You believe in a God who plays dice, and I believe in the total arrangement’.
In 1918, Planck managed to get Born released from the army, and in the same year, a collaboration with Fritz Haber led to a discussion of how an ionic compound is formed when a metal reacts with a halogen, known today as the Born-Haber cycle.
Even before Born took up the professorship in Berlin, von Laue had changed his mind and decided that he wanted it after all. He arranged with Born and the faculties concerned to exchange jobs. In April 1919, Born became full professor and director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the Faculty of Science of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt. While he was there, the University of Göttingen told him that it was looking for a replacement for Peter Debye as director of the Institute of Physics. On this occasion, Einstein advised him: ‘Theoretical physics will flourish wherever you are; there is no other Born to be found in Germany today’. In negotiating for the post with the Ministry of Education, Born secured another professorship, in experimental physics, in Göttingen for his old friend and colleague James Franck.
In 1919, Elisabeth Bormann joined the ‘Institut für Theoretische Physik as his assistant’. She developed the first atomic beams. Working with Born, Bormann was the first to measure the mean free path of atoms in gases and the size of molecules.
In 1954, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Walter Bothe for his work in quantum mechanics.
As a curiosity, Max Born is the grandfather of the British-Australian artist Olivia Newton-John.
