Max Born

55:09who's played Max Born, who's the guy when um Oppenheimer goes to Göttingen to get training in quantum mechanics, he's being tutored by Max Born >> Yes. >> at the blackboard. >> Yes. >> Please let us know. But, Max Born is one of the greats. >> Yeah. >> We've talked about him a lot. He turned Göttingen into the world center of theoretical physics in the 1920s. Um background figure for Robert Oppenheimer. Um co-authored that Born-Oppenheimer approximation that I was talking to you about. >> Right? >> Yes. >> So, Oppenheimer is one of his most influential papers is one of Max Born's

55:49least influential papers in terms of the papers that Max Born contributed to the field. His main papers are the quantum mechanics papers of 1926, which followed the Heisenberg paper of 1925, the "Im Deutung" paper, where he finally comes up with this matrix mechanics and he's like, "Guys, let's just not care about what the electron is doing. Let's only care about how the electron is jumping around." >> One of our most viral clips and one of our best episodes was I think like three episode three or four was around this concept of the Heisenberg quantum paper and how Max Born followed it up and the matrix multiplication. And it is really, really

56:30very well explained and was a fundamental unlock for me mentally and how I think about these concepts. So, I just really do encourage people to look back at that episode if you're interested in that subject because I think we did a really good job in covering it. >> so, too. I'm very proud of that paper. >> That was really That was really, really good. And so, it's all all the dots are connecting for me again. >> Yeah. So, one of the big papers was the follow-up to Heisenberg's paper where Heisenberg said, "I've come up with a multiplication rule where AB A * B does not equal B * A. I don't know what I'm doing." And Max Born was like, "Actually, you just don't know any math. This is like trivial. This is matrices. This is linear algebra." And so, in the 1926 paper by Jordan, Born, and Heisenberg,

57:13the first section of that entire paper is Born explaining linear algebra to physicists cuz it's the first time that like a bunch of physicists, you know, we they used to only learn calculus. >> Right. >> Linear algebra is a very different beast that now is fundamental to all of physics but Max Born knew about it because he was a mathematical physicist at the time. Um and then what the thing that he won the Nobel Prize for in 1954 was for something called the Born rule. At the time, there was this idea of the wave function, right? Schrödinger had come up with the wave function and his wave mechanics, and nobody really knew what the wave function is, but like the

57:53numbers that were coming out kind of made sense with the periodic table and things like that. He's the guy who figured out that the wave function is related to the probability that you see in experiments. So, that whole thing about God does not play dice that Albert Einstein was pissed off about, that's because Max Born implemented the Born rule when it came to interpreting what the wave function meant for an experimentalist. And for an experimentalist, what it means is if I'm measuring whether the electron is spin up or spin down, the wave function tells me the probability >> Right. >> of these two states. >> Yes. >> And that's all I can tell you, right? >> So, pissed off Einstein for a very good

58:34reason. >> Yes. >> Um introduced this kind of fundamental randomness that now we take for granted in quantum mechanics. So, you know, huge, huge deal in physics.