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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 530.092
EAN num: 9780738206936
ISBN number: 0738206938
Label: Basic Books
Manufacturer: Basic Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 400
Printing Date: March 01, 2005
Publishing house: Basic Books
Release Date: March 01, 2005
Sale Popularity Level: 454358
Studio: Basic Books
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In 1920, Albert Einstein wrote to Max Born, “Theoretical physics will flourish wherever you happen to be; there is no other Born to be found in Germany today.” The End of the Certain World presents for the very first time Born’s full story: Nobel physicist, a discoverer of quantum theory, exile from Hitler’s Germany, teacher of nine Nobel physicists. Born’s role in the “Golden Age of Physics” helped to shape the science of the twentieth century and open the door to the modern era. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner, among others, flocked to Göttingen, Germany in the 1920’s to work with Born, the physicist who had discovered one of the most profound principles of the century - the physics of indeterminacy. In a cruel twist of fate Born, a pacifist who loved science for its beauty, had educated these renowned scientists who developed the atom bomb. Not everyone embraced Born’s revolutionary quantum principle. Throughout much of his forty year friendship with Einstein, the two debated the nature of the universe - deterministic versus non-deterministic - with Einstein declaring “God does not play dice”, even though the Nobel Committee supported Born’s position when they awarded him the 1954 Prize. A social history and a history of science as well as an intimate biography, The End of the Certain World reveals the story of a great physicist and humanitarian and his struggle with the forces of religion, politics, and war during the upheavals of the twentieth century.
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Rated by buyers -
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 very 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, very 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," squalour 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 ... Read More
Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers -
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 very 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 very 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
Rated by buyers -
This is a good, easy-to-read biography of a well known yet not quite household name physicist who was pivotal in the early days of quantum mechanics and beyond.
This book is mainly a biography of the man and less so of the science. It is very good in that respect and shows how Born fit into the history of those times. Due to the fact that he was a Jew in Germany before WWII lends well to an interesting history.
The science is in here yet quite useless to the layman and the language the author sometimes uses is confusing to the physicist. The physicist will want to see more of the physics and mathematics but you will not get it in this book.
Many will see that Max Born was a person not too much different than a university educated person nowadays in his beliefs, morals, and ethics. Since mine are opposed to his, I personally did not find his life to be much of an inspiration (with such quotes as "For the belief that there is only one truth and that oneself is in possession of it, seems to me the deepest root of all that is evil in the world").
Of course, the book just made me jealous of his brains, but most biographies do that to me.
Rated by buyers -
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.
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