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Physics Bulletin

Max Born

Nevill Francis Mott

Published Jul 1, 1982• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Max Born was a scientist of the greatest distinction who presided over the Göttingen school of theoretical physics in its most famous days, when from 1925 onwards a brilliant group suddenly saw its way to formulate a set of laws for the behaviour of inanimate matter which has served us well up to the present time. This set of laws, which from the very beginning was called quantum mechanics and for part of which Born was awarded the Nobel prize much later (in 1954), is what he will be remembered for and what he would probably have wanted to be remembered for.

DOI
10.1088/0031-9112/33/7/037

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Problems of Atomic Dynamics

Max Born

In 1925-26, the late Max Born gave two sets of lectures at M.I.T., one on the structure of the atom, the other on the lattice theory of rigid bodies. Problems of Atomic Dynamics contains the text of both sets.What gives this volume its remarkable interest is just those dates: 1925-26. This must have been, by all accounts, the headiest period in twentieth-century physics, and Max Born was one of the leaders of the ferment. As Norbert Wiener remembers, When Professor Born came to the United States [for these lectures in 1925] he was enormously excited about the basis Heisenberg had just given for the quantum theory of the atom.These lectures represent perhaps the most vivid written record of the transition between the old quantum theory of Bohr, and the new theory. At the time I began this course of lectures, Born writes, first paper on the quantum theory had just appeared. Here his masterly treatment gave the quantum theory an entirely turn. The paper of Jordan and myself, in which we recognized the matrix calculus as the proper formulation of Heisenberg's ideas, was in press, and the manuscript of a third paper by the three of us was almost completed.Even as the lecture series progressed, Born became familiar with results, which he introduced into his presentation: Pauli's fourth quantum number, Dirac's formalism, his own work on a general operational calculus. And yet, in spite of the conditions of revolutionary changes in physics that year -- in which established ancien regime principles were collapsing almost monthly -- the theory is developed with a cool elegance and with a formal completeness which may be regarded as a limiting case of its current state. These lectures represent the foundations of quantum theory, and they have withstood the tests of time -- the tests of more than forty years of experimental evidence.

•Jan 1, 1960•22 citations
Max Born was a scientist of the greatest distinction who presided over the Göttingen school of theoretical physics in its most famous days, when from 1925 onwards a brilliant group suddenly saw its way to formulate a set of laws for the behaviour of inanimate matter which has served us well up to the present time. This set of laws, which from the very beginning was called quantum mechanics and for part of which Born was awarded the Nobel prize much later (in 1954), is what he will be remembered for and what he would probably have wanted to be remembered for.
Quantum theory originated from the constant introduced by Max Planck in his radiation law in 1900. Later Niels Bohr used the idea of matter waves for the explanation of atomic spectra. Heisenberg gave an algebraic treatment, called matrix mechanics, while Erwin Schrödinger formulated his wave mechanics. He published the first of four papers containing the celebrated equation in the Annalen der Physik in 1927, and showed that the atomic spectra resulted from solving his wave equation for the vibrational states. Schrödinger moved from Zürich to Berlin as Planck’s successor. In the year 1933 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Dirac. With Hitler’s coming to power, however, Schrödinger was outraged and decided to leave Germany to take up a fellowship in Oxford. In 1934 he was offered a permanent position at Princeton University, but he did not accept it. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin in 1938, where he stayed till his retirement in 1955.
This article discusses the history of quantum physics, beginning with an analysis of the process through which a community of quantum theorists and experimentalists came into being. In particular, it traces the roots and fruits of Max Planck’s papers in irreversible processes in nature. It proceeds by exploring the origin and subsequent development of Niels Bohr’s so-called ‘planetary model’ of the atom, focusing on the extension of the model by Arnold Sommerfeld and members of his school as well to Bohr’s use of his principles of correspondence and adiabatic invariance. It also considers the post-war years, as the problems of atomic spectroscopy sparked the development of new methodological approaches to quantum theory. Finally, it offers a history of the two distinct new forms of quantum mechanics put forward in the mid-1920s: Werner Heisenberg, Max Born, and Pascual Jordan’s matrix mechanics, and Erwin Schrödinger’s wave mechanics.
In 1925-26, the late Max Born gave two sets of lectures at M.I.T., one on the structure of the atom, the other on the lattice theory of rigid bodies. Problems of Atomic Dynamics contains the text of both sets.What gives this volume its remarkable interest is just those dates: 1925-26. This must have been, by all accounts, the headiest period in twentieth-century physics, and Max Born was one of the leaders of the ferment. As Norbert Wiener remembers, When Professor Born came to the United States [for these lectures in 1925] he was enormously excited about the basis Heisenberg had just given for the quantum theory of the atom.These lectures represent perhaps the most vivid written record of the transition between the old quantum theory of Bohr, and the new theory. At the time I began this course of lectures, Born writes, first paper on the quantum theory had just appeared. Here his masterly treatment gave the quantum theory an entirely turn. The paper of Jordan and myself, in which we recognized the matrix calculus as the proper formulation of Heisenberg's ideas, was in press, and the manuscript of a third paper by the three of us was almost completed.Even as the lecture series progressed, Born became familiar with results, which he introduced into his presentation: Pauli's fourth quantum number, Dirac's formalism, his own work on a general operational calculus. And yet, in spite of the conditions of revolutionary changes in physics that year -- in which established ancien regime principles were collapsing almost monthly -- the theory is developed with a cool elegance and with a formal completeness which may be regarded as a limiting case of its current state. These lectures represent the foundations of quantum theory, and they have withstood the tests of time -- the tests of more than forty years of experimental evidence.