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Born Max. Biography of a scientist

Biographies of great scientists

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Born Max
Max Born (1882-1970).

His name is put on a par with such names as Planck and Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg. Born is rightfully considered one of the founders of quantum mechanics. He owns many fundamental works in the field of the theory of the structure of the atom, quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity.

Max Born was born on December 11, 1882 in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) and was the eldest of two children of Gustav Born, professor of anatomy at the University of Breslau, and Margaret (nee Kaufman) Born, a talented pianist who came from a prominent family of Silesian industrialists. Max was four years old when his mother died, and four years later his father married Berta Lipstein, who bore him a son. Since his family was connected to the leading intellectual and artistic circles of Breslau, Max grew up in an atmosphere conducive to his development. He received his primary education at the Kaiser Wilhelm Gymnasium in Breslau.

Although Max intended to become an engineer, his father encouraged him to take a variety of courses at the University of Breslau, which he entered in 1901 after his father's death. At the university, Max studied many subjects, but soon became interested in mathematics and physics. He spent two summer terms at the universities of Heidelberg and Zurich. In 1904 he entered the University of Göttingen, where he studied under the guidance of famous mathematicians - David Hilbert and Felix Klein, as well as Hermann Minkowski. Hilbert, appreciating Born's intellectual abilities, made him his assistant in 1905. Max also studied astronomy in Göttingen. By the time he received his doctorate in 1907 for a dissertation on the theory of the stability of elastic bodies, his interests had shifted to the field of electrodynamics and the theory of relativity.

After graduating from university, Born was called up for a year of military service in a cavalry regiment in Berlin, but was soon demobilized a few months later due to asthma. This brief experience of military service strengthened in him a dislike for war and militarism, which remained with him throughout his life.

For the next six months, Born studied at the University of Cambridge, where he attended the lectures of J. J. Thomson. Returning to Breslau, he began to conduct experimental research, and then began theoretical work on the theory of relativity, developed by Albert Einstein in 1905. Combining the ideas of Einstein with the mathematical approach of Minkowski, Born discovered a new simplified method for calculating the mass of an electron. Having appreciated this work, Minkowski invited Born to return to Göttingen and become his assistant. However, Born worked with him for only a few weeks due to the sudden death of Minkowski, which followed in early 1909.

Having completed his theoretical study of the theory of relativity in the same year, Born became a lecturer at Göttingen. Here he investigated the properties of crystals depending on the arrangement of atoms. Together with Theodor von Karman, Born developed an exact theory of the dependence of heat capacity on temperature, a theory that still underlies the study of crystals. Crystal structure remained Born's main area of ​​research until the mid-twenties.

In 1913, Born married Hedwig Ehrenberg, daughter of a Göttingen law professor. They had a son; who later became head of the pharmacological faculty at Cambridge, and two daughters.

In 1915, Born became assistant professor of theoretical physics with Max Planck at the University of Berlin. During the First World War, despite his distaste for war, Born conducted military research on sound measurements and evaluated new inventions in the field of artillery. It was during the war that his friendship with Einstein began. In addition to physics, these two people were united by a love of music, and they enjoyed playing sonatas together - Einstein on the violin, and Born on the piano.

After the war, Born continued research on the theory of crystals, working with Fritz Haber to establish a relationship between the physical properties of crystals and the chemical energy of their constituent components. As a result of the efforts of two scientists, an analytical technique known as the Born-Haber cycle was created.

When Max von Laue expressed a desire to work with Planck, Born agreed to exchange posts with him temporarily and went to the University of Frankfurt in 1919 to take the place of professor of physics and director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics. Returning two years later to Göttingen, Born became director of the University Physics Institute. He made it a condition that his old friend and colleague James Frank be appointed to the same institute to supervise the experimental work. Under Born's leadership, the Physical Institute became a leading center for theoretical physics and mathematics.

At first, Born continued his research on the theory of crystals in Göttingen, but soon he began to develop the mathematical foundations of quantum theory. Although his work with crystals was extremely important and helped lay the foundations of modern solid state physics, it was Born's contributions to quantum theory that brought him his greatest success.

By the twenties, most physicists were convinced that all energy was quantized, but the original quantum theory left many problems unsolved. Born wanted to create a general theory that would cover all quantum effects.

In 1925, Born's assistant Werner Heisenberg took a major step in solving this problem by suggesting that certain mathematical principles underlie all atomic phenomena. Although Heisenberg himself could not understand the mathematical foundations of the relationships he found, Born understood that Heisenberg used matrix operations (mathematical transformations performed on tables of numbers or variables according to certain rules). With one of his students, Pascual Jordan, Born formalized Heisenberg's approach and published the results in the same year in an article entitled "On Quantum Mechanics". The term quantum mechanics, introduced by Born, was supposed to denote a new highly mathematical quantum theory developed in the late twenties.

During the winter of 1925-1926, Born was a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1926, Schrödinger developed wave mechanics containing alternative formulations of quantum mechanics, which in turn, he showed, were equivalent to formulations of matrix mechanics. Returning to some methods of classical physics, wave mechanics treats subatomic particles as waves described by a wave function. Applying the principles of wave mechanics and matrix mechanics to the theory of atomic scattering, Born concluded that the square of the wave function, calculated at a certain point in space, expresses the probability that the corresponding particle is in this place. For this reason, he argued, quantum mechanics only gives a probabilistic description of the position of a particle. The Born description of particle scattering, which has come to be known as the Born approximation, has proven to be extremely important for computations in high energy physics. Shortly after the publication of the Born approximation, Heisenberg published his famous uncertainty principle, which states that one cannot simultaneously determine the exact position and momentum of a particle. Again, only a statistical prediction is possible here.

The statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics was developed further by Born, Heisenberg and Bohr; because Bohr, who lived in Copenhagen, did a great deal of work on this interpretation, it became known as the Copenhagen interpretation. Although a number of founders of quantum theory, including Planck, Einstein, and Schrödinger, disagreed with this approach because it rejects causality, most physicists have accepted the Copenhagen interpretation as the most fruitful. Born and Einstein engaged in a lengthy correspondence in letters on this subject, although a fundamental scientific difference never marred their friendship. Born's fame as a reformer of quantum mechanics, which formed the basis of a new picture of the structure of the atom and the subsequent development of physics and chemistry, attracted many gifted young physicists to him in Göttingen.

After attending a physical conference in Leningrad in 1928, Born's health deteriorated, physical exertion took its toll, and he was forced to spend a year in a sanatorium. Here he wasted no time in writing a textbook on optics, later banned by the Nazis, but widely used in English-speaking countries. It was one of several textbooks and popular writings written by Born on various general physical topics; he published a large number and special works.

Born was an extremely charming man. At the same time, he was very resolute and uncompromising in those cases when it came to unfair deeds.

In 1932, Born became dean of the science faculty in Göttingen. After Hitler came to power in the very first month, the Göttingen scientific center actually ceased to exist. Many leading professors, including Bourne, were removed from their posts. The institutes were headed by fascist Gauleiters, who were far from the interests of science. Many scientists, who previously tried to "ignore" dirty politics in order to preserve only academic freedom, ended up in different camps.

Born leaves Germany and moves to the UK. Here he was a lecturer at Cambridge for the next three years. After spending six months at the Indian Physical Institute in Bangalore, where he worked with the Indian physicist Venkata Raman, Born took up a post as professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 1936. At the university he taught and did research until his retirement in 1953, when he became a retired professor emeritus at Edinburgh.

Born had many students. Physicists who later became major theorists worked for him. It is enough to list their names: Heisenberg, Dirac and Pauli, Fermi, Blackett, Wiener, Geytler, Weiskopf, Oppenheimer, Teller. Born worked with prominent Soviet scientists: Fok, Frenkel, Boguslavsky and Rumer. As a teacher, Bourne had a very highly developed critical talent, but he was so closely connected with goodwill that all his students felt like members of one big family, the main goal of which was knowledge. He knew how to create such an atmosphere of benevolence in which everyone, without hesitation, could choose their own path in solving the problem that occupied everyone.

Perhaps, thanks to Born's personal qualities, it was in his school that people who stood on the most extreme worldview positions united. Suffice it to recall that Pascual Jordan, with whom Born did many excellent physical works, is usually characterized in his philosophical views as a subjective idealist, while Max Born himself was a materialist, and his other student, Dirac, was an atheist who denied any religion.

Such a difference in worldviews did not interfere with their scientific cooperation until each was required to decisively determine his political views with the coming to power of the Nazis. Some of Born's students and colleagues had already received the Nobel Prize for their work in quantum theory, but Born's own contributions were not so highly regarded until 1954, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation." wave function". He shared the prize with Walter Bothe, who was awarded for his experimental work on elementary particles. In the Nobel lecture, Born described the origins of quantum mechanics and its statistical interpretation, asking the question: "Can we call something with which the concepts of "position" and "motion" cannot be associated in the usual way, called an object or a particle?" And he concluded as follows: "The answer to this question no longer belongs to physics, but to philosophy."

Although Born is best remembered for his work in the field of quantum mechanics, his research and work played an important role in all the areas in which they touched. “I never liked being a narrow specialist,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I would not be too close to the modern manner of conducting scientific research by large groups of specialists. The philosophical foundation of science has always interested me more than concrete results.”

Shortly after his resignation, Born and his wife settled in Bad Pyrmont, a small town near Göttingen, their pension rights and confiscated property restored by the post-war government. Here Born continued his scientific work, prepared new editions of his publications, wrote and lectured on the social responsibility of scientists, especially in connection with the use of nuclear weapons. In 1955, he was one of sixteen Nobel laureates who gathered on the island of Mainau, located on Lake Constance in Switzerland, to craft a statement condemning the further development and use of nuclear weapons. In the end, fifty-one Nobel laureates signed this declaration. Two years later, Born was one of eighteen Goettingenians (all from a group of leading West German physicists) who swore not to take part in the development and production of such weapons and who participated in the campaign against West German nuclear armament.

Born died in a Göttingen hospital on January 5, 1970.

Author: Samin D.K.

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