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"Die Welt wird eben nicht mit Vernunft regiert, und erst recht nicht mit Liebe", schrieb Max Born 1921 an seinen engen Freund Albert Einstein. Zwölf Jahre später, als die Nazis ihn zur Emigration nach England zwangen, sollte er am eigenen Leib erfahren, was dies bedeutete. Und selbst als das Nazi-Regime bezwungen war, erlebte Born die Zündung der ersten Atombombe als eine weitere Katastrophe. Es mag wie eine grausame Ironie des Schicksals erscheinen, dass gerade der überzeugte Pazifist Born, der die Wissenschaft um ihrer Schönheit willen liebte, der Lehrmeister für die Entwickler der Atombombe war: Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Johann (John) von Neumann und andere waren einst nach Göttingen gepilgert, um mit Born zusammenzuarbeiten, jenem Physiker, der eines der grundlegendsten Prinzipien des 20. Jahrhunderts entdeckt hatte: die Unbestimmtheit. „Max Born - Baumeister der Quantenwelt“ erzählt erstmalig die ganze Geschichte Borns - die des Nobelpreisträgers, des Mit-Architekten der Quantentheorie, des Exilanten aus Hitler-Deutschland, des Lehrers von neun Nobelpreisträgern. Born war maßgeblich daran beteiligt, die Wissenschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts zu prägen und der Moderne den Weg zu weisen. Zusammen mit seinen „Wunderkindern“ - darunter sein Assistent Werner Heisenberg - löste Born das Quantenrätsel. Aber während Heisenberg 1933 der Nobelpreis verliehen wurde, ging Born leer aus. Mehr als 20 Jahre musste er noch warten, und als man ihm 1954 den Preis endlich zuerkannte, erhielt er ihn für seine statistische Deutung der Quantenmechanik. Dies war in mehr als nur einer Hinsicht eine Bestätigung: Über lange Jahre hatte er hierüber eine Debatte mit Einstein geführt, und sein Standpunkt, dass Gott doch würfelt, erfuhr mit dem Nobelpreis eine späte Anerkennung. „Max Born - Baumeister der Quantenwelt“ ist nicht nur eine sozial- und wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Analyse, sondern auch eine intime Biografie. Nancy Thorndike Greenspan entfaltet die Geschichte eines großen Physikers und Humanisten und zeigt seinen Kampf mit den Mächten der Religion, der Politik und des Krieges auf. ... Read more

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Professor Born, one of the most distinguished physicists of our time, has selected some of his most popular writings covering a period of thirty years, framed between his introduction to Einstein's Theory of Relativity (1921) and the postscript to the American edition of The Restless Universe (1951). It includes several discussions of Einstein's work, a short autobiography and articles dealing with the philosophical background of physics and its revolutionary changes during Professor Born's lifetime. Each treatment of a problem illuminates it from a different angle - all of them from a personal point of view. ... Read more

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The Nobel laureate’s brilliant exposition of the kinetic theory of gases, elementary particles, the nuclear atom, wave-corpuscles, atomic structure and spectral lines, electron spin and Pauli’s principle, quantum statistics, molecular structure and nuclear physics. Over 40 appendices, a bibliography, numerous figures and graphs.
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Customer Reviews (7)

Atomic Physics: 8th Edition (Dover Books on Physics and Chemistry)
This book on Atomic Physics is in its eighth printing for good reason. Its a five star book and I have evaluated against a college level, more detailed equivalent.This book has a balanced level of dialog, illustrations, graphs, charts and theoretical formulas to understandable explanations.I would recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. It will become your Bible. PS: I am retired and seventy+.CFC

Wonderful Real Physics
This is a wonderful book to read if you have an advanced degree in math and physics. The latter is needed to understand it completely. It's probably also a wonderful book to read even if you don't have an advanced degree in math and physics, for it does actually penetrate the equations and reveal the physics hidden within them. It is telling of the calculus-centric view of its era, that the author uses Fourier transforms, separation methods for PDEs, perturbation theory, and other advanced analysis tools, without flinching, but shies away from simple algebraic methods as being 'mathematically too advanced.'

Good preparation for your preliminary exam in Modern Physics
I used this book many years ago to prepare for my preliminary exams (pre-PhD exams) in modern physics. Although it's dated (ca. 1950), that doesn't matter very much. The strong feature is that it discusses the content without getting into a lot of formalism, and gives the historical connection between different aspects that one is not likely to see in the usual text books.

An excellent overview of the development and character of modern physics!
Atomic Physics is based upon a series of lectures on physics that Born gave in Germany in 1933.Since then it has been translated into English updated significantly as physics developed.This means that the book represents sound physics, and not the relatively undeveloped 1933 picture of the physics.

I should note that the title of the book is slightly misleading. The original German edition was called modern physics. However, the publisher of the English version already had a book called modern physics, so the English version was renamed Atomic Physics.

Born covers a wide range of topics dealing with the gasses, elementary particles, the structure of the nucleus, atoms, molecules.He has written the book in the context of describing the historical development of each topic.This is done in a flowing style by only including important equations in the text.Derivations and so fourth are placed in the 130 pages of appendices in the back of the book.This allows the text to tell a story without the burden of constant discontinuities due to equations. If you want to see the maths, just flip to the back of the book.

I would classify this book somewhere between popular science and a textbook.Like a popular science it tells a story, it flows and readable.People with some knowledge of physics can read this book and learn a lot form it.Even without the appendices.On the other hand, like a text it doesn't give hand wavy, simplified descriptions of the physics.This is good hard physics.

While I wouldn't call this book a text, it is far too general for that, it does give an excellent overview of the development and character of modern physics from one of the people who was there in the thick of it.I highly recommend it to any person that is acquainted with physics.Non-scientists would probably benefit more from reading something like Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe.

This is a great book, it is well written, structure and relevant.It fully deserves five stars.To reiterate what other reviewers have said, I wish present-day textbooks were written this well.

You must have it
Well, this is probably not the most up to date text but it is still one of the best. The book is a collection of topics (Atomic Physics, Solid State Physics, some of QM, some of classical Physics, Statistical Thermodynamics), which are explained in a short, simple and clear way. This is also a great book for those who are familiar with QM: they will find an excellent collection of topics that are just outlined on other standard QM textbooks. Moreover one can learn a lot from the original way M. Born approaches important subjects in Physics (how to recognize the Physics in every concept, for example). This is a book everyone interested in Physics should have in her/his library. ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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Dieses Buch ist bis heute eine der populärsten Darstellungen der Relativitätstheorie geblieben. In der vorliegenden Version haben J. Ehlers und M. Pössel vom Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut) in Golm/Potsdam den Bornschen Text kommentiert und einen den anschaulichen, aber präzisen Stil Borns wahrendes, umfangreiches Ergänzungskapitel hinzugefügt, das die stürmische Entwicklung der Relativiatätstheorie bis hin zu unseren Tagen nachzeichnet. Eingegangen wird auf Gravitationswellen und Schwarze Löcher, auf neuere Entwicklungen der Kosmologie, auf Ansätze zu einer Theorie der Quantengravitation und auf die zahlreichen raffinierten Experimente, welche die Gültigkeit der Einsteinschen Theorie mit immer größerer Genauigkeit bestätigt haben. Damit bleibt dieses Buch nach wie vor einer der unmittelbarsten Zugänge zur Relativitätstheorie für alle die sich für eine über das rein populärwissenschaftliche hinausgehende Einführung interessieren. ... Read more