Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

86 CHAPTER 20. MAX BORN: I DID IT!
• My surprise and joy were thus all the greater, especially as I was
awarded the prize, not for the work done jointly with Heisenberg, but
for the statitical interpretation of Schrödinger’s wave function...
• It is not surprising that this acknowledgement was delayed for 28 years,
for all the great names of the initial period of the quantum theory were
opposed to the statistical interpretation: Planck, deBroglie, Schrödinger
and, not least, Einstein himself.
• It cannot have been easy for the Swedish Academy to act in opposition
to voices which carried as much weight as theirs; therefore I had to
wait until my ideas had become the common property of all physicists.
This was due in no small part to the cooperation of Niels Bohr abd his
Copenhagen school, which today lends its name almost every where to
the line of thinking I originated,
20.2 Nobel Presentation Speech
• When the young Heisenberg, formerly a pupil of Sommerfeld in Munich
and of Bohr in Copenhagen, published his epoch-making preliminary
work on the exact laws for atomic phenomena in 1925, he was Born’s
assistant in Göttingen.
• His work was immediately continued by Born, who gave logical mathematical
form to the Heisenberg theory. Owing to this progress, Born, in
collaboration with his pupil Jordan and later with Heisenberg also, was
able to expand the latter’s original results into a comprehensive theory
for atomic phenomena. This theory was called quantum mechanics.
• Born found that the Schrödinger wave function determines the probability
of the measuring results. For this reason, according to Born,
quantum mechanics gives only a statistical description.
• Such a radical break with older ideas could not of course prevail without
opposition. But Born’s conception is now generally accepted by physicists,
with a few exceptions.