The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born, the Nobel Physicist Who Ignited the Quantum Revolution

Max Born (1882--1970), physicist, Nobel prize winner and close friend to Albert Einstein, was one of the brilliant minds of the twentieth century. An advocate of the new theories of Einstein and a researcher into the science that was to become quantum mechanics, he soon attracted a stream of brilliant young students around him at Frankfurt and Goettingen. This was a golden age of physics and a formative period for modern science, when many of the foundations of modern science were being sketched out in German cafes. Nine of Borna s students went on to win Nobel prizes for their work, although four (two working for the Germans and two for the US) saddened him by working on the development of the atomic bomb. In 1924 he published a paper entitled a Quantum Mechanicsa the first to label the research with this name. He played a crucial role in the development of the theory of quantum mechanics and of wave function. In the 1930s he was forced to flee from Germany to escape the anti--Semitic

NANCY THORNDIKE GREENSPAN has published many articles and has co-authored three books with her husband, child psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan. She has spent the past four years gathering, translating, and cataloguing documents from archives around the world for this book. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland.