Problems of Atomic Dynamics

by Max Born

In 1925-26, the late Max Born gave two sets of lectures at M.I.T., one on the structure of the atom, the other on the lattice theory of rigid bodies. Problems of Atomic Dynamics contains the text of both sets. What gives this volume its remarkable interest is just those 1925-26. This must have been, by all accounts, the headiest period in twentieth-century physics, and Max Born was one of the leaders of the ferment. As Norbert Wiener remembers, "When Professor Born came to the United States [for these lectures in 1925] he was enormously excited about the new basis Heisenberg had just given for the quantum theory of the atom." These lectures represent perhaps the most vivid written record of the transition between the "old" quantum theory of Bohr, and the "new" theory. "At the time I began this course of lectures," Born writes, "Heisenberg's first paper on the new quantum theory had just appeared. Here his masterly treatment gave the quantum theory an entirely new turn. The paper of Jordan and myself, in which we recognized the matrix calculus as the proper formulation of Heisenberg's ideas, was in press, and the manuscript of a third paper by the three of us was almost completed." Even as the lecture series progressed, Born became familiar with new results, which he introduced into his Pauli's fourth quantum number, Dirac's formalism, his own work on a general operational calculus. And yet, in spite of the conditions of revolutionary changes in physics that year—in which established ancient regime principles were collapsing almost monthly—the theory is developed with a cool elegance and with a formal completeness which may be regarded as a "limiting case" of its current state. These lectures represent the foundations of quantum theory, and they have withstood the tests of time—the tests of more than forty years of experimental evidence.

Genres: Physics

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1926

About the author

Max Born (was a German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 30s. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Walther Bothe).

Reviews

[albin james · Rating 5 out of 5]

He used time, talent and heart
Such went his life among us
And far from great speeches, from great theories
To his task each day, one could say of him
He changed life

He was a professor, a simple professor
Who thought knowledge was a great treasure
That all the nobodies only had to get through
School and the right of anybody to get instruction

- Jean-Jacques Goldman