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"The world is not ruled by reason;
even less by love," Max Born wrote to his close friend
Albert Einstein in 1921. Twelve years later, as the Nazis
forced him to emigrate to Great Britain, he felt the personal
impact of that statement. Even after the defeat of the Nazis,
the explosion of the atom bomb inflicted a further blow.
It was a cruel twist of fate that Born, a pacifist who loved
science for its beauty, had educated the developers of the
atom bomb. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner,
and John von Neumann, among others, had flocked to Gottingen,
Germany, to work with Born, the physicist who had discovered
one of the most profound principles of the century -- the
physics of indeterminacy.
The End of the Certain World presents
for the 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" in the 1920s helped to shape the science
of the twentieth century and open the door to the modern
era. Together with his Wunderkinder -- including
his assistant Werner Heisenberg -- Born solved the quantum
puzzle. But whereas Heisenberg received his Nobel Prize
in 1933, Born was overlooked; he had to wait more than twenty
years to receive one.
When Born finally did win the Nobel Prize
in Physics in 1954, it was awarded for his theory of the
indeterminate nature of the atomic world. It was a validation
on more than one level. He had a long-standing debate with
Einstein on the subject, and Born's position -- that God
does play dice -- had been recognized; we indeed
live in a world of uncertainty.
The End of the Certain World is a
social history and a history of science as well as an intimate
biography. Nancy Thorndike Greenspan unfolds the story of
a great physicist and humanitarian, to reveal his struggle
with the forces of religion, politics, and war.
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 cataloging documents
from archives around the world for this book. She lives
in Bethesda, Maryland.
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