Memories of my grandfather (remarks at the opening of the Max-Born-Institut)

Sebastian Born

Prof. Hertel, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I'm afraid that I will be speaking in English as my German is not very good - but good enough to understand from the previous speakers how many people have worked so hard to make this new Institute a reality. I am here to represent my family and to thank all of those people who have done us the honour of naming the Institute after my grandfather. Really my father should be here addressing you for two reasons: first, he is a scientist and I am not; and second, because of course he knew my grandfather much better and more intimately than I did and so would be able to talk about him in more depth.

My own first-hand memories of Max Born are relatively few. This is because, when I was a boy, he and my grandmother lived in Germany, in the spa town of Bad Pyrmont. They moved back to Germany from Edinburgh in 1953, the year I was born. We visited them with my father from time to time but Max was by then an old man. I have vivid memories of Bad Pyrmont which was and probably still is a lovely town, surrounded by wooded countryside and full of parks. It was also full of old people being a spa town and  Max Born would often  take my older brother (also called Max) and I for walks to feed the many birds and small animals which abounded in these parks.

He was a gentle and thoughtful man. I have two particular memories of him which I would like to tell you about. The first was one evening when I was having trouble as a small boy in a strange house getting to sleep and Max Born put on some music by Mozart to comfort me. He loved music and played the piano himself very well. The second was one day when I discovered him pouring himself a glass of red wine in the late morning. I must have looked rather surprised because he caught my look and told me that he liked to drink a bit of wine because it had the effect of "keeping us old people lively". I found this a very human and honest thing to say coming from such a great mind.

As I said earlier, I am not a scientist but I was trained at school as a mathematician and indeed I went to Cambridge University to read mathematics. But while there I realised that I would never be a creativemathematician and that I did not have the real gift to make discoveries in this field of intellectual enquiry. (Although my own father has never really accepted my change of career and still introduces me from time to time as "my son - the mathematician"!) I now work as a literary agent in London, representing playwrights and screenwriters. It seems that many of Max Born's descendents in my generation have gone into the dramatic arts - one of my cousins is the actress and singer Olivia Newton-John - although the family tradition of mathematics is continued by my cousin John Pryce (the son of my father's sister Margaret).

I am therefore the more impressed by the mind and achievements of Max Born having studied maths and physics enough to appreciate not only his own work but his teaching and work with other collaborators - particularly that extraordinary generation of physicists which included his close friend and correspondent Albert Einstein, his friend and contemporary Max Planck and his pupil Werner Heisenberg. We tend to take their work now as part and parcel of our established understanding of the physical world and it is salutory to remember that those theorems and laws of quantum mechanics and nuclear physics which they discovered were initially to them bold hypotheses which had to be proved and corroborated. This was brought home to me on a recent visit with my father to the Edinburgh archive which contains some of my grandfather's papers. Amongst these papers, with the voluminous collection of letters he had written to my father after he and my grandmother had moved back to Germany in the 1950's and 1960's (we forget how people corresponded before the telephone became so ubiquitous), I came across a green bound-volume of his hand-written lecture notes from his early days as assistant to the great mathematician David Hilbert. They are as  beautifully clear and elegant as a great text-book and looking  through them I realised that  they contained work which I had learnt at school as established theorems - but were then newly-minted from the mind of Hilbert.

There is one other anecdote which I would like to tell you about which I came across recently in a memoir about my grandfather written by his pupil Wolf, with whom he collaborated on his great textbook on optics. Wolf was a young student in Edinburgh attending a series of  lectures given by Max Born. After one of the lectures, he thought he had discovered a flaw in the logic of  the argument. He want home and spent the rest of the day checking and double-checking his results, and then spent the night agonising over whether to raise this problem with my grandfather. The next morning he had plucked up his courage and, after that day's lecture, he asked to speak to Max and told him of the mistake. My grandfather was apparently furious that this young student had had the temerity to question his work and stormed off. But he had also listened to the explanation given by Wolf, checked that Wolf's argument was sound, and apologised profusely the next day - after which they became firm friends and colleagues. I tell this story because it illustrates to me that my grandfather had the human qualities of pride and self belief but also the humility to discover that he had been wrong and to place the worth of the scientific result above any other consideration.

Once again, many thanks to Professor Hertel and all the other people who invited my wife and I to this auspicious occasion. We hope that the work of this new Institute will develop and continue the high standards associated with the name of  Max Born.