Max-Born-Institut Berlin (MBI)

Fig .8
The Borns’ house in Bad
Pyrmont.
Fig. 9
Manuscript of Max Born’s Lecture
on “Hope in the Face of
the Atomic Danger.”
Fig. 10
Max von Laue (standing) with
Max Born and Otto Hahn in
Lindau in the 1960’s.
8
Max Born • Gustav Born
implications of scientific discoveries. My father was a founding member of the Pugwash movement,
and remained indefatigable in promoting his views through lectures, broadcasts and
newspaper articles, and in conversation with people at all levels from his postman to Government
ministers. The clarity and sincerity of his urgings made a profound and lasting impression
on many people throughout the world, particularly on the younger generation. His published
speeches and writings, e. g. My Life and My Views, remain well worth reading for insights
and conclusions so well reasoned that they seem self-evident. It says much for the regeneration
of Germany as a liberal democracy that, although his public utterances were often opposed
to official policy and despite remaining a British citizen, there was never any question about
his freedom to say what he liked. On the contrary, the German Government bestowed on him
its highest distinction, the Grosse Verdienstkreuz, the German equivalent of the British Order
of Merit.
At this point I feel bound to declare my credentials: I am a medical biologist, neither a physicist
nor a mathematician, and therefore unable to pay any kind of informed tribute to my father’s
massive contributions to science, most conspicuously to the foundations of quantum mechanics
for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, and of solid state physics which, in the opinions of Sir
Neville Mott, where themselves of Nobel Prize calibre. His insights and originality were matched
by the clarity in the exposition of his own ideas as well as those of other physicists. Max’s account
in Physikalische Zeitschrift of the theory of relativity, published in 1916 soon after it first appea-