Max-Born-Institut Berlin (MBI)

Fig. 25
Robert Oppenheimer, one time Ph. D
student of Max Born.
Fig. 26
Max Born accompanied by Maria Göppert and Viktor
Weisskopf in Göttingen (photograph reproduced by courtesy
of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, a gift from Jost
Lemmerich).
lopment, and I have no doubt that my father’s message was to the effect that he would not
participate. I also recall a review in The Listener, at that time the house journal of the BBC, of
Robert Jungk’s book Brighter than a Thousand Suns which gave the first coherent account of
the development and dropping of the atomic bombs. The claws of my memory have kept a firm
grip on the following sentence. “Of all the brilliant men that parade through these pages only
one, Max Born, refused from the start to have anything to do with the devilish invention”. I am
particularly proud of him for that!
With this in mind, great interest attaches to Max Born’s relationship with Robert Oppenheimer
[25], who joined Max’s Institute in Göttingen in 1926 and during the War became Director of
the Manhattan Project which produced the first atomic bombs. Göttingen was an exciting and
exhilarating environment for Oppenheimer and the other brilliant young men working with Max
Born, because their first papers on quantum mechanics were just appearing. In November 1926
Oppenheimer wrote to his friend Francis Ferguson: “The science [in Göttingen] is much better
than at Cambridge, and on the whole probably the best to be found”. In his contribution to a
Festschrift for Oppenheimer’s sixtieth birthday Max refers to the Born-Oppenheimer approximation,
their most important work together, and makes complimentary comments; Max clearly
recalled their collaboration as entirely enjoyable. That is interesting, because it sheds light on
my father’s ability to empty his memory of unpleasantnesses. An anecdote from Oppenheimer’s
Göttingen period shows him as a somewhat conceited young man, whose brashness caused
trouble in the famous weekly seminars on the atom by dominating the discussion to the detriment
of the other young participants, Heisenberg, Fermi, Teller, Weisskopf, Maria Göppert [26]
– not people lightly ignored. After a while they complained, in writing. Max put their letter on
his desk in such a way that Oppenheimer could not fail to see it when he came to talk about
his thesis. The ruse worked and the interruption ceased. However, thinking that Oppenheimer
Max Born • Gustav Born 15