The end of a certain world
by Ian Simmons
[ bookreviews ]
I am amazed that this is the first biography of Max Born, given his pivotal role in modern physics, but it is. Born was the first person to use the term 'quantum mechanics', in a 1924 paper developing Einstein's idea of quanta and was tutor to no fewer than eight Nobel Prize winners, as well as winning one himself for his work on indeterminacy. It was this work that led Einstein, a close friend, to produce his famous quote "God does not play dice"; Born, however, proved that God did. He is also, strangely enough, Olivia Newton-John's grandfather. I do not believe these facts are connected.
When writing the biography of a scientist, there is temptation to treat their life as simply a backdrop to the progress of the science they were doing. Given the period Born lived through (1882-1970), this would have been a massive mistake and it is one which Nancy Thorndike Greenspan adeptly avoids. Her title, The End of a Certain World is well chosen and, when considered in the context of Born's life, has a particularly appropriate double meaning. On one hand, from the scientific viewpoint, it calls to mind his work on quantum indeterminacy, which brought the notion of certainty in physics to an end. From the historical viewpoint, though, it definitely conjures up the cataclysmic changes through which Born's native Germany went in the course of his life. As a Jew, living in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, the certain world he had been brought up in did, indeed, come to an end, forcing him out of his university post and into exile in Cambridge and Edinburgh. (He took with him, bizarrely, a letter signed by Adolf Hitler, thanking him for his work!) Born's life provides an excellent mirror for the century he helped shape and Nancy Thorndike Greenspan's narrative makes the most of this opportunity to put the science in its social context. So, we get to hear about the growing anti-Semitism that haunted his German university career, while at the same time getting a sense of the character of the gifted students he drew to him - his Nobel winners Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Maria Goppert-Mayer, Max Delbruck, Enrico Fermi, Eugene Wigner, Linus Pauling and Gerhard Herzberg, in themselves a role-call of crucial physicists of the last century, plus other such as Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb, and Edward Teller, the über-hawk of US nuclear warfare, described here as having "Mephisto-like eyes".
As well as being Born's biography and, by his association with scientists like these and others such as Einstein, a history of 20th century physics, this also manages to be a social history of the times. This is no mean trick to pull off, tracking Born through WWI military service, life as a Jew under the Nazis and into the Cold War as a trenchant pacifist saddened by how his discoveries and the talents of his brightest students had been corrupted by the arms race.
This is a fascinating book, and an appropriate one to publish during World Physics Year and on the 100th anniversary of relativity. If you buy only one book about physics this year, make it this one.
