Max-Born-Institut Berlin (MBI)

Attosecond Imaging:
Asking a Molecule to Paint
a Self-Portrait
The importance of a researcher’s contribution to science can be measured by two factors –
whether it extends the scientific foundations laid by previous generations and how it enables
future developments. Looking back over the 50 years since Max Born was awarded the Noble
Prize, we can see that he and the other fathers of quantum mechanics made one of the
greatest contributions to science in its history: They extended the classical mechanics of
Newton into the world of electrons, nuclei, atoms and molecules. In so doing, they transformed
physics, chemistry and biology. Some of their ideas, such as the “quantum leap”, have
even entered the common language.
I never met Max Born. In fact, Canadian science hardly existed at the time of his most important
contributions, and yet my connection to his legacy is not so far removed. I work in the
National Research Council of Canada, which came into international prominence after World
War II with the arrival of Gerhard Herzberg. Herzberg had been a postdoctoral fellow in Göttingen
in 1928. During his stay there he was greatly influenced by both the science that James
Frank and Max Born were studying and the atmosphere in which it was pursued. Herzberg was
particularly impressed by the interplay between theory and experiment that Franck and Born
encouraged. He staffed the group that he formed at NRC with both theoretical and experimental
scientists. This mixture also characterizes my own group’s approach to femtosecond science
today.
Herzberg and his team extended the new quantum mechanics to molecules. By comparing its
predictions with the measurements that he and his group were performing, they revealed the
architecture of many molecules. Today, scientists around the world are still building on the
insights gained by Herzberg’s work on molecular structure and Max Born’s contributions to
quantum mechanics.
I am very pleased that my office at NRC is next to the former office of Dr. Herzberg. It is now
kept as a living “museum” used by guests at NRC. In Herzberg’s time these office walls displayed
portraits of some of the great scientists who had influenced him. They are still there.
There are 12 of them. Figure 1 shows a grouping of four portraits that includes James Franck
Max Born • Paul Corkum
Paul Corkum
National Research Council
of Canada
Ottawa, K1A 0R6, Canada
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