Appointment of Max Born to Chair of Natural Philosophy, 1936

In 1936, Max Born (1882-1970), a refugee from Nazi Germany, was appointed to the Tait Chair of Natural Philosophy. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize (1954) for his work in quantum mechanics.

n January 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, and Born, who was Jewish, was suspended. He emigrated to Britain, where he took a job at St John's College, Cambridge, and wrote a popular science book, The Restless Universe, as well as Atomic Physics, which soon became a standard text book. In October 1936, he became the Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where, working with German-born assistants E. Walter Kellermann and Klaus Fuchs, he continued his research into physics. Max Born became a naturalised British subject on 31 August 1939, one day before World War II broke out in Europe. He remained at Edinburgh until 1952. He retired to Bad Pyrmont, in West Germany. He died in hospital in Göttingen on 5 January 1970.

Max Born was born in Wroclaw, Poland (which was then Breslau, Germany), on 11 December 1882. He was educated at the Gymnasium and at the University in his home city, and he also studied at the Universities of Heidelberg, Zuerich, Goettingen (where he obtained the degree of D.Phil.), and Cambridge. Prior to his arrival in Britain in 1933 when he fled the growing danger of racial and political persecution in Nazi Germany, Born had been Professor at the Universities of Berlin, Frankfurt-am-Main, and Goettingen. At Cambridge he held the post of Stokes Lecturer of Applied Mathematics. In 1936, he was appointed to the Chair of Natural Philosophy with special reference to Mathematical Physics at Edinburgh University. In 1939 he became a British subject. His work on Relativity and on various aspects of Atomic Structure had already earned him international renown and while at Edinburgh he continued to extend the literature of his science. Born retired in 1953, and in 1954 he was the joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics. With Walther Bothe (1891-1957) of the University of Heidelberg, Born had been awarded the Prize for the statistical formulation of the behaviour of subatomic particles. His studies of the wave function led to the replacement of the original quantum theory (which regarded electrons as particles) with an essentially mathematical description representing their observed behaviour more accurately.

After the war Born moved to Frankfurt (1919) and then Göttingen (1921), where he soon turned his attention to addressing the difficulties of the quantum theory of the atom, the second field in which his contributions were fundamental. As director of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Born was responsible for Göttingen becoming one of the most important international centres of the new ‘quantum mechanics’ which he named in 1924. In 1925 Born recognized that a new formulation his former assistant Heisenberg had proposed could be expressed in terms of matrix operations, leading to the development of matrix mechanics by Heisenberg, Born, and Jordan (another of Born's impressive group of students and assistants). Then in 1926 Born initiated the statistical interpretation of Schrödinger's wave function—which he immediately saw to contradict the determinism of classical physics. It was for this work especially that Born was honoured with the Nobel prize in physics in 1954. Born's description of particle scattering, which became known as the Born approximation, has become important in high energy physics.

In 1933 antisemitic civil service laws stripped Born of his post in Göttingen and resulted in his emigration to Britain, where he was for three years Stokes lecturer in Cambridge. Searching for a more permanent position he spent six months at the Indian Institute of Physics in Bangalore, but was then appointed Tait professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, which he held from 1936 until his retirement in 1953. There he gradually built a school of research physicists, concentrating in particular on the physics of the solid and liquid states. Many of his students and collaborators came from outside Britain, including a number of refugees from the continent. Among those who worked with Born in Edinburgh were Klaus Fuchs (later notorious for passing atomic weapon secrets to the Soviets), Fürth, Lonsdale, Bradburn, Peng, H. S. Green, Cheng, Yang, Huang, and Wolf, with the collaborations with Fuchs and Green (on the statistical mechanics of condensed systems) being particularly important.

Sources

• Richard Staley, 'Born, Max (1882–1970)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [[1], accessed 22 Aug 2014]