On the Fiftieth Anniversary of Max Born

On December 11, 1932, the outstanding world physicist Max Born, professor at the University of Göttingen, celebrated his fiftieth birthday. He began to occupy himself with physics at a time when the first works of Planck and Einstein had initiated the development of quantum theory and the theory of relativity—two directions in physics that radically changed our customary ideas and the concepts created by so-called classical physics. As a student, after reading the first article of the still entirely unknown Einstein, Born immediately left for Switzerland to see him and was one of the first to grasp the full depth and importance of the new theory. This fact already showed the interest with which Born always approached new and bold ideas. Distinguished by exceptional capacity for work and a vast breadth of outlook, Born devoted himself to research in the most diverse fields of physics, and almost all his works created new directions, yielded valuable results, and gave rise to further work by numerous pupils. Born managed to combine in himself the theorist with the physicist who understands experimental material for his theoretical investigations. He took a close part in creating the Stern–Gerlach experiment, carried out at that time by his assistants. He made his name chiefly through his works on the atomic theory of the solid state.

But the principal field in which Born was destined to show his talent—his ability to work and to attract the necessary people—was quantum mechanics. It is enough to list the names of those who worked with him from 1923: his assistants Pauli, Hund, Heisenberg, Jordan, and Wigner. All these are people who have gained worldwide renown, created new fields in science, and now have numerous pupils.

Born, together with Sommerfeld, deserves credit for developing Bohr’s ideas and creating the conditions for the discovery of quantum mechanics. In 1925 his assistant Heisenberg made the decisive step in this direction, and Born and his assistant Jordan in a short time created from Heisenberg’s fragmentary ideas a complete system of quantum mechanics.

Born’s chief personal achievement is the discovery of the statistical interpretation in quantum mechanics: the unification of mechanics and statistics for atomic processes into a single whole. In recent years Born’s interest has turned from general questions to the application of new methods to concrete problems and to applications of quantum mechanics to the problems of quantum chemistry, crystal theory, and so on.

Distinguished by a broad outlook, Born clearly understood the harm that borders and barriers, which divided the world after the war, bring to science. He devoted much effort to establishing scientific ties, severed by the war, with French, English, and Soviet physicists. He delivered lectures in Zurich, came to us for the anniversary of the Academy of Sciences, traveled to England and America. In Göttingen he opened wide the doors of his Institute to foreign colleagues. For a long time he had as his assistant the Belgian Rosenfeld, and then for several years—the writer of these lines—a Soviet physicist.

Yu. Rumer