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The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born

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If anyone more prototypically German in character than Max Born ever lived, I'd be interested in meeting him. Born incarnated all the best in German history, all the virtues of German culture, and yet that same German culture did its utmost to destroy him. Inevitably, this biography of Max Born is also a "biography" of Germany in the first half of the 20th Century, and of the Nazi sociopathy that created the Shoah.

History, not science, is the metier of "The End of the Certain World." Those lucky few readers who fully understand relativity and quantum physics will be able to grapple with Born's contributions to science and to judge his centrality, but such an understanding is not at all required to grapple with the biographical portrait of the man and his many scientific colleagues and rivals. Author Nancy Greenspan makes no effort to explain quantum physics per se; I doubt that she would be qualified to do so. Instead she portrays the dynamics of Born's career as a scientist, in terms of his working relationships with other physicists and academic institutions. Of course, the cast of physicists in this drama includes virtually every great name of the century - Bohr, Planck, Heisenberg, Dirac, Einstein, inter alia - and each of them emerges as a specific human being, some admirable, some hateful, in Greenspan's smooth, detailed narrative. Born's marriage and the fitful course thereof constitute a parallel 'novel' to his scientific career, and a precise counterpoint to the larger narrative of Jewish assimilation and European anti-Semitism.

Of particular emotional interest was the story of Born's efforts to rescue Jewish scientists as well as his own extended family members from the certain fate that awaited them in Nazi Germany. Born was not alone in that effort; in fact, he was a beneficiary of such an effort by others, including some of his own previous students. What is particularly painful to read about is the indifference and even hostility toward the plight of Jews of Germany. Born found that 'everybody' knew what was likely to be happening, but few cared enough to intervene. Physicists, in fact, fared better than most. Jewish musicians, for example, were jealously excluded from any opportunities to migrate to England because English musicians feared the competition.

During his years in England and Scotland, first as a refugee and later as a naturalized citizen, Born strayed occasionally over the edges of political activism but quickly withdrew to the sanity of science. Politically, he was hardly more than a Labor party voter, yet he and other "German" scientists were routinely suspected of disloyalty, sometimes because of attachment to Germany! and sometimes because it was widely assumed that they were inherently Russian communist-sympathizers. The lunatic actions of Klaus Fuchs gave that attitude an unfortunate plausibility. As for Max Born, he remained from his earliest statements to his last profoundly anti-ideological; he declared himself "skeptical with regards to economic beliefs...not..based on ethical principles." In Scotland, when he was denounced as a probable communist, he stated that he was "not a socialist, as you seem to think, if this expression means blind belief in Marxist theories." Dialectical materialism, he said, was "rubbish." Author Greenspan summarizes her undertanding of his position:

...with the "western system of profit and vested interests," squalor and poverty existed for the masses and luxury for the few. The capitalists system - the unethical drive for profit - had supported the military buildups in Germany and Japan. Born wanted to temper the "ethical inferiority of the profit system" by merging the efficiency of free-market production with a regard for workers' rights.

In Born's later years, in safer but no more economically secure straits, he became conscientiously concerned with the social/historical effects of his own and others' science, and devoted much of his time and prestige to formulating a scientific community commitment to resisting militaristic misuse of knowledge. He was an active backer and signatory of the two major proposals for nuclear disarmament of the 1950s.

The stimulus that sent Nancy Greenspan into years of research about Born - reading his letters and his wife's sprawling diaries, scoring national archives, learning enough physics and math to write such a book comfortably - was oddly personal, all based on a friendship with Born's grand-daughter, who introduced her casually to surviving members of the Born family. Here's a riddle: what well-known 'British' singer/actress is the grand-daughter of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist?

Altogether, this is a vivid old-fashioned biography, well worth reading for its historical significance, but fundamentally a full-length portrait of an exceptional human being, virtues and flaws included. I finished the book thinking 'hey, Max Born was a great guy,' and 'oy, what he had to live through!'

Having developed a great respect for the works of Max Born through his books on atomic physics, I always was surprised that he received little credit (compared with Bohr, Heisenberg, and others who also developed a lot of QM).

This book provides an exciting, interesting review of his life that would interest physicists, people of German ancestry, Jewish ancestry, and others interested in early 20th century history, from a personal point of view. As a physicist, I like that the physics ideas are not simplified or glossed over. For example, Born realized that the electron had to occupy a 3D space within the atom (rather than, for example, a circular Keplerian orbit), because of the compression of solids. This is NOT a physics book, however, but an excellent biography.

Max Born was an amazing man. From his childhood until his retirement in Bad Pyrmont, Circa, he had accomplished more than most people. After refining the world of Quantum Mechanics using his own theories, he helped changed the world. However, he was not recognized for that. It wasn't until after he retired that he was recognized for his participation on wave functions. Max Born lived a life full of tragedy and greatness. Being a Jewish man in Germany, life didn't come by very easily for him at times. Being forced to emigrate from his home, and the coming to the realization that he was the one who taught some of participants who created the atom bomb, he came to the realization that, "Love is a power just as strong as the atom." This quote from him proved to show that he did have a love for Physics, he enjoyed it, and it was a passion of his. Nancy Greenspan did an excellent job with this book. She showed the world about the life of Max Born through the first thorough biography of him. She showed us his life through a portrait with her words. She showed us him in his times of despair and his times of prosperity. This book is a great read. It will show you a dramatic life as well as informing you about the world of Physics, specifically the Quantum Revolution. This book will teach you of a great man, who lived a great life, and people now are just beginning to find out his great imagination.

An excellent blend of biography with the relevant aspects of the history of physics and the social context in which it evolved. It makes clear that the immense importance of Born's role in the emrergence of quantum mechanics has been inadequately recognized. The author also conveys clearly the great impact Born had as a teacher of great physicists and through his many magisterial books. I learned considerably more than I expected to about both Born and the history of physics in the first half of the 20th century, and the graceful, clear prose fo the author made it a pleasure to do so.

I've been reading steadily about the physicists from the same time period as Einstein up through and including oppenheimer and Feynman. My training in science is mostly neuroscience and cell biology, but I've been teaching a lot of chemistry lately at the local community college. This means I have to teach about the atom and what is now known about electrons and basic atomic theory. I've always been very curious about physics, especially physics that deal with atomic particles and light. Einstein has always been one of my favorite people to read about and quote, so it was natural to me to start reading about the people he came across, and those who helped build on his work through work of their own. Besides, it has always driven me batty trying to separate all the names and the countries of these guys. So many were German, and if they were not German, they went to German schools of physics for their training, or were deeply involved with the German school of physics. I was always getting Born and Bohr mixed up...so I decided the more I knew about these guys the better able to explain their work.

This book is first rate. I cannot comment on the accuracy of the physics, but there are many physics concepts that Greenspan elucidated because they were Born's ideas or discoveries, and from reading this book, I certainly understand these ideas much better than I did before. Just as in reading David McCullough's books on John Adams, where you cannot separate the man from his political beliefs about individual freedom, neither should you read a book about a man such as Born and expect to get through without being introduced to the work of his lifetime, which was explaining and proving parts of atomic theory through mathematics. I enjoy reading the science, even if I have to go back and read it more than once to gain an understanding of it. Even more thrilling is reading the work of these men and being able to better explain these concepts in my classes.

I admire greatly theoretical physicists and mathematicians, even if I am incapable of doing this work myself. As Einstein once stated, he wanted to know these things because he could better understand the 'work of God.' I find that the more I read from the physicists of this period of time, the more I understand. It's difficult to fathom so many great men (and a few women) who lived at one time period and worked together to bring the world to an understanding of physics as we know it. It makes you wonder why we have no outstanding physicists now (except for Stephen Hawkings) and it makes me wonder how limiting our education is, that not only the U.S. but Europe and Asia seem not to be able to produce the great men that we saw so many of during the first 50 years of atomic physics (say from 1890 to 1950). What happened, and where have all these magnificent minds gone? Why can we not produce men and women like this now...these are the questions that educators should be asking themselves.

Born's life with his family and friends, the escape from a rabidly anti-Semitic Germany, the life spent in Scotland, all of which were entwined with his work is absolutely fascinating. Greenspan did a beautiful job not only of research but of editing, and placing in her book, the important letters and research. I've only seen biographies like this from one other person, and he dealt with the great men from the Revolutionary time period in America. This is definitely a book worth buying and reading, and one that I recommend highly to my students and those interested in this time period. Warning to readers, this is a heavy duty book, and not one to be undertaken lightly!

Karen Sadler

Well done to Nancy Greenspan for this book.
Max Born was a jewish scientist who was expelled from his job at a German university when World War 2 broke out. A friend of Albert Einstein's, he like many, fled from the NAZIs and headed west.
This book gives a sound and very readable account of his life. It's well written and interesting and I certainly appreciate the writer's efforts as I value such a biography on the life of any scientist.
I also have two books actually written by Born, one of which is "The Restless Universe" and is a delightful script on concepts of Physics. It shows a super sharp mind of Max Born. Though he was quite a heavyweight in Atomic Physics it seems he was always underated. Hopefully this work will set the record straight.

Although the physics in this book has been criticized, I noticed only a couple of errors. They did not seriously degrade the book. Be sure to read Born's reaction to his student Oppenheimer on page 146. ("My soul was nearly destroyed by this man.") I was a little disappointed that there was not more about Jordan - the Nazi who collaborated with Born for many years. Also, it would have been nice to have put in a little about Born's granddaughter - the singer/actress Olivia Newton-John.

I received this as a gift from someone who knew I read a lot of books about J.R. Oppenheimer, who was one of Born's doctoral students. It's a fascinating biography about a fascinating man. I agree with many comments that came before and will add my own observations:
1) I'm not a physicist (though I am a scientist), yet I found the physics in the book lacking compared to treatments in other books I read (say, books by Richard Rhodes, Davis' biography "Lawrence and Oppenheimer," etc). Even the description of what made the quantum revolution a revolution is fairly hidden because of the inadequate description of the physics.
2) The author tells us about Hedi Born's "hothouse" upbringing and expectations, alluding to this as an important dynamic in the marriage. Pages and pages go by before it's brought up again, when Hedi has an affair with a colleague of Born's. What her "hothouse" upbringing had to do with the affair is not really explained.
3) The author also casually drops the bombshell that Born converted to Lutheranism to please his mother-in-law. This seems so out of character for the Born Greenspan depicted: non-religious but proudly Jewish.
4) The author mentioned that Born didn't get along with his mother-in-law, then when she died, it was devastating to him. A contradiction that's not resolved satisfactorily.
5) From the bibliography, it appears the author is fluent in German, yet many German terms are used without translation (Sutterlin script, eg). The appearance of German words (not italicized!) in English sentences is a bit odd; she should have used the entire phrase and then supplied the translation. It would give the book more flavor to do this.

The title of the book clearly is to be taken two ways. Relating to the development of quantum theory where the calculations of the most basic quantities such a position and momentum of a particle yield fundamentally inexact quantities, probabilistic distributions rather specific numbers. Also relating to the end of the relatively tranquil and to an extent predictable, world of well to do professional and academic Jews in Germany as the result of a horrific anti-Semitism. That story, the far more poignant of the two, makes the book, unexpectedly, a page-turner.

The origin of matrix mechanics and wave mechanics appears here directly connected to the individuals involved, their personalities including Born's often openly exposed. The book is a wonderfully detailed history of the scientific events described, paper by paper, as they happened. The author has done a wonderful job. The book is very thoroughly annotated. The personal biographical information is sometimes very revealing. I'd read the published Born-Einstein correspondence and was aware of Einstein's understandable refusal to find acceptable Born's move back to Germany, pretty explicit in one letter. Einstein though probably understood and so will you if you read the book.

Nancy Thorndike Greenspan's The End Of The Certain World: The Life And Science Of Max Born, The Nobel Physicist Who Ignited The Quantum Revolution tells of a physicist forced to emigrate to England when the Nazis took over - and found his pacifist nature compromised when he discovered his findings had helped the developers of the atom bomb. Born's complete story is presented here for the first time, from his achievement of the Nobel prize as discoverer of quantum theory to his exile from Germany and his teaching of nine Nobel physicists in turn. A splendid coverage of a major figure.