To start the article saying that Max Born was the grandfather of actress Olivia Newton-John is, without a doubt, to start with the lowest part of her brilliant career. This is because Born has a gigantic and complex work, which makes him one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.
However, not everyone has heard about the life and work of the man who revolutionized science. quantum mechanics, especially for being contemporary with other brilliant scientists, such as Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr. Did you know more about Max Born? Check it out.
What was “the cause of all evil”?
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)
One of the best known facts about the German quantum physicist is that he warned the world about “the cause of all evil”. This is an excerpt from his acceptance speech for the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics. Born was awarded “fundamental research in Quantum Mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function”.
No text of his speech, Max Born reflected on the philosophical implications of his work. For the German, the idea of certainty or absolute truth was a product of the imagination and should not be admitted to science. According to Born, the belief in this was “the root cause of all the evils in the world”.
Some consider that the prize was offered belatedly, since, among the scientists of his generation, he was the last to receive it. The Nobel Foundation awarded him the award 28 years after completing the work for which he was congratulated.
Friendship with Einstein
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Albert Einstein and Max Born were not just contemporaries and scientists. Between the pair, a great friendship developed and was carried until Born’s death, in April 1955, when Einstein passed away.
The friendship was long and left humanity with a fascinating collection of letters. , which comprise a period longer than four decades, having passed through the two great world wars. Among the letters exchanged by the two, debates about quantum theory, the role of scientists and their families, also about the things they would do when they finally met.
It was on the pages they exchanged that Einstein wrote a of his most famous phrases, in which he refused to accept the probabilistic view that would favor the theory that describes how the matter that makes up the small universe of atomic and subatomic particles behaves. Interestingly, Born was one of the main advocates of the interpretation that Albert contested.
The legacy of a genius
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)
The greatest legacy of Max Born’s years of work and research is the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics. It was because of the German scientist’s discovery that other researchers and scholars were able to predict the result of a measurement carried out in a quantum mechanical system.
In the area, the “Born Rule” is a key principle , for contributing to the mathematical treatment of the segment. His legacy joins that of other names such as Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, who have made important and innovative advances. His work was hampered by being forced out of Germany by the Nazi party in 1933.
In England, he was a professor at Cambridge, working with the Polish physicist Leopold Infeld. He then spent two years in India, before moving permanently to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he remained for 17 years, until his retirement in 1953.
