Science: The Passionate Physicist

The Passionate Physicist Max Born was a physicists' physicist. As head of the University of Gottingen's prestigious Institute of Theoretical Physics in the pre-Nazi era, he was one of the pillars of the flourishing German scientific community. A brilliant teacher, he attracted many of the great names of the atomic era—Oppenheimer, Teller, Fermi—to Göttingen's lecture halls and laboratories. Equally communicative outside the university, he produced a flood of books and essays to unravel the complex new physics for an uncomprehending public. But Born, who died in Göttingen last week at the age of 87, is perhaps...

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