The Passionate Physicist

The Passionate Physicist Max Born was a physicists' physicist. As head of the University of Gottingen's prestigious Institute of Theoretical Physics in the pre-Nazi era, he was one of the pillars of the flourishing German scientific community. A brilliant teacher, he attracted many of the great names of the atomic era--Oppenheimer, Teller, Fermi--to Goettingen's lecture halls and laboratories. Equally communicative outside the university, he produced a flood of books and essays to unravel the complex new physics for an uncomprehending public. But Born, who died in Goettingen last week at the age of 87, is perhaps best remembered as one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics--a basic mathematical tool for probing the atom.

God's Subtlety. By the early 1920s, investigations into the atom had struck an impasse. The old Newtonian laws could explain such motions as those of the planets around the sun; they could not account for the subtle behavior of electrons whirling around the nucleus of an atom. Trying to work their way out of this quandary, Born and other scientists held that the motion of the electron was discontinuous or broken into pockets of energy called quanta. Others conceived of electrons as continuous, uninterrupted waves. Though these theories helped explain atomic phenomena, they could not tell physicists where an individual electron might be located at any given instant. Why?

Born finally provided an answer. Unlike the motion of celestial bodies, he said, the movement and position of electrons cannot be precisely determined. Only the statistical probability of their position can be ascertained with accuracy. The idea was brilliantly elaborated by Bern's colleague, Werner Heisenberg, but it provoked serious challenge. Even Bern's old friend, Einstein, with whom he often played violin sonatas, did not believe that particle motion--or, indeed, any basic phenomena in nature--was so completely in the grip of chance. "God may be subtle," said Einstein, "but he is not malicious."

Clever Pupils. As a Jew, Born was automatically a practitioner of what Hitler called "Jewish physics"; he was dismissed from Goettingen when the Nazis came to power in Germany. After taking refuge in Britain, he continued to teach for many more years at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. But when he returned to Germany after his retirement in 1953, he became increasingly concerned by the great ethical issues that grew out of scientific advances. Though he had not worked on the atomic bomb, he was deeply disturbed by his possible influence on those who did. "It is satisfying to have had such clever pupils," he said, "but I wish they had shown less cleverness and more wisdom." He spoke out strongly against German acquisition of nuclear weapons, deplored the arms race and questioned the vast allocation of scientific resources for space.

In his final years, Bern's greatest anguish was over the impact of science on modern man. Fearing a total decline of civilization's old values, he repeatedly urged scientists to ponder the social, economic and moral consequences of their work. "Intellect," he said in a recent collection of autobiographical essays, My Life & My Views, "distinguishes between the possible and the impossible; reason distinguishes between the sensible and the senseless. Even the possible can be senseless."

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