The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born, the Nobel Physicist Who Ignited the Quantum Revolution , Nancy Thorndike Greenspan , Basic Books, New York, 2005. $26.95 (374 pp.). ISBN 0-7382-0693-8
Nancy Thorndike Greenspan tells us that her biography of Max Born was inspired by conversations with his daughter Irene. The strengths and weaknesses of The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born, the Nobel Physicist Who Ignited the Quantum Revolution may well be linked to the close association with the Born family that Greenspan formed while writing it. Among its strengths are the marvelous photos and the full use of the riches of the Born family archives. Indeed, access to those files has allowed Greenspan to write a double biography, of Max Born but also of his wife Hedwig (Hedi) Ehrenberg Born. But a weakness of the book—the somewhat petulant thesis that Born was never sufficiently credited for his contribution to the creation of quantum mechanics—may also derive from Greenspan’s closeness to the Born family.
Greenspan gives two arguments for her claim that Born was slighted. The first is that the history of the formation of quantum mechanics was written mainly by physicists within the intellectual circle of Niels Bohr’s Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen. Greenspan argues that “not being a member of the Copenhagen circle, Born was omitted” (page 148). This strikes me as, at best, not proven. However, her second contention is more credible. It rests on her knowledge of Nobel Prize politics and on some meticulous work in the Nobel Prize archives and is a plausible account of why Born was not chosen to share the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics with Werner Heisenberg (pages 190–193).
The first nine chapters, roughly two-thirds of the book, deal with Born from his earliest years until 1933, when the Nazis suspended him from his Gottingen University professorship. Greenspan paints a vivid picture of what it meant to be Jewish in Germany in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Born was in his early 20s when he began to focus on physics. We see him first in a 1905 summer seminar devoted to the recently discovered electron. Was it rigid or deformable? Was its mass mechanical or electromagnetic? Now Born began to encounter, one after another, developments in physics like relativity theory and Bohr’s atomic model. As Greenspan tells us of his reaction and of his own groundbreaking work on lattice dynamics, she gives the reader a good sense of the evolution of pre—World War II physics. It is these nine chapters that I would recommend as ancillary reading for physics students. Greenspan makes limited use of Born’s scientific papers when describing his physics: The publications she uses are mainly secondary sources. But she has supplemented her published sources with heroic work in archives, and her use of the letters, papers, and reminiscences of Born’s contemporaries enriches and humanizes her narrative.
Born’s wife, Hedi, first appears in chapter 3 when Born, at age 29, seeks a bride. On the basis of interviews with the Born’s children, she is described as self-indulgent (page 156). But the material Greenspan presents can also be interpreted as the story of a spirited woman who, unfortunately, was born at a time when marriage, whether love-based or loveless, was one of her few options. Hedi’s journey to find love and outlets for her intelligence and energy strained the Born’s marriage. Born, however, worked tenaciously to preserve the relationship and by the time they were settled in Edinburgh in the late 1930s, Born could write of their life together as a “true loving marriage between old people” (page 219). Eventually, through Born’s tenacity, they reconciled.
The final third of the book may be less interesting to Physics Today readers. It is a year-by-year account of family events—both major and minor—from the arrival in 1933 of the Borns in Cambridge, England, until Born’s reception of the Nobel Prize in Physics in December 1954. (The 18 years until Born’s death in 1970, and Hedi’s two years later, are covered in a three-page epilogue.) The physics and philosophy of physics that Born did in those years is only touched upon and not well placed in the context of work by others. One also misses any attempt by Greenspan to summarize Born’s personality or his political odyssey from German nationalist to socialist and to the conviction that one must “fight nationalism in whatever form it appears” (page 261). Without such a summary, Born’s month-to-month moods and views, as Greenspan sketches them, can seem vacillating and capricious.
Many English-language biographies of physicists have been written by physicists or by historians whose life’s work is the study of the development of physics. One thinks of Abraham Pais on Bohr and Albert Einstein, David Cassidy on Heisenberg, or Helge Kragh on Paul Dirac. Despite my criticisms, I stand in awe of how well Greenspan, a comparative outsider, has pulled off this biography.
