Solvay: The Movie

Arguably the most famous photograph of physicists is the group portrait taken at the 1927 Solvay Conference in Belgium. It turns out that a brief motion picture of that event also exists. In the course of this three-minute film, a dozen or more present and future Nobel laureates walk in and out of the frame, including Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr, and Max Planck.

Forgotten or neglected for decades, the film was shown in public for the first time at the APS meeting by Nancy Greenspan, author of “The End of the Certain World,” the first full biography of Max Born (http://www.maxborn.net). Born is credited with the insight that the wavefunction appearing in Erwin Schrodinger’s famous equation provided not the exact location of an electron inside an atom but rather merely a statistical likelihood of the electron being at various locations.

This view of quantum reality would later take on the name of the “Copenhagen interpretation,” in honor of Niels Bohr. Greenspan argues that Born has been underappreciated in histories describing the establishment of quantum science. Speaking at a press conference, APS president Marvin Cohen (Univ California, Berkeley) underscored this point. Max Born’s group at the University of Gottingen, active over the period from 1922 to 1932, was, Cohen suggested, the most illustrious theoretical physics “school” of all time.

The list of Born students or junior colleagues includes no less than Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Enrico Fermi, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Linus Pauling, Eugene Wigner, and Robert Oppenheimer.