Bengaluru: Within the campus of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru, is a large house hidden away behind rusty white gates and cocooned in tall, dark green trees. It’s the residence of the institute’s registrar, unremarkable, except for the fact that it was where the legendary physicist Max Born lived for six months while he was teaching at the university.
One of the lesser-known aspects of how Indian academia developed almost 100 years ago is the presence and contribution of a number of legendary international scientists who visited the country. In 1935, Born—known for his outsized role in the development of quantum mechanics—joined the IISc upon Indian physicist C.V. Raman’s invitation. He had all intentions of settling down and making the city his home, but it was not to be.
It began in 1933. With the Nazis in power, Born was suspended from his professorship at the University of Göttingen because he was Jewish. Despite his rich contribution to academia and his mentorship of famous physicists like Enrico Fermi and Robert J. Oppenheimer, he had to flee Germany. He moved to Cambridge, UK, where he was a temporary lecturer from 1933 to 1935.
This was where Born was working on quantum mechanics, the study of the fundamental behaviour of particles that make up the basic building blocks of nature—and atoms. He made an important contribution to the field, which came to be called the Born rule and predicted the position of a particle. In 1954, the German physicist won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in the field.
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The first connection to India
While Born was in the UK, Raman invited him to IISc, Bengaluru. Raman, who had won the Nobel in 1930 for the Raman Effect, had become the director of the institute the same year Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany and was intent on making the institute a powerhouse for physics. He wanted the best physicists across the globe to join his institute.
In a letter to Born, Raman wrote that IISc’s Council had invited him to accept a special appointment as Reader in Theoretical Physics. He was offered an honorarium of ₹15,000 for six months, “a princely salary”, according to the IISc’s magazine Connect.
In 1935, Born promptly accepted Raman’s invitation and moved to Bengaluru, with his wife, Hedi. He began his term there on the 1 October 1935 and lived on campus, the magazine noted.
According to Born’s autobiography My Life: Recollections of a Nobel Laureate, he lived in the two-storey bungalow on the campus.
“We had a large garden with beautiful trees and flowers,” he wrote, “and two tennis courts which were screened off by marvellous bougainvillaea shrubs. The Raman family lived in a similar house just across the road.”
There is little information about who lived in the bungalow before the Borns. Today, it is the residence of the university’s registrar. The neighbouring house that Raman lived in—similarly tucked away within trees inside white gates—is home to the institute’s director.
ThePrint is in touch with IISc’s archives and reached the registrar via calls. The report will be updated when new information is made available.
A bittersweet time in India
According to the Connect, Born had a bittersweet time in India. While he tremendously enjoyed the culture, food, and lifestyle, he was greatly bothered by poverty. He admired in his book how Hindus and “Mohammedans” lived close together with “no friction”. Even though there are no physical objects that commemorate his stint, his legacy lives on at the institute as researchers built upon his knowledge.
At IISc, Born conducted lectures on subjects that were the topic of the day.
One of the largest quests in physics, even today, is that of the Grand Unified Theory. The laws of physics apply today at different scales, such as atomic versus gravitational. The laws of one do not apply to the others, which require a new set of laws. The Grand Unified Theory aims to come up with a set of equations or laws that can encompass all other laws of physics under one umbrella.
Researchers are nowhere close to accomplishing this, but not for lack of trying. Among the many theoretical physicists, Born was also at the forefront of this research. After he reached India, one of his most famous lectures, Connect said, was the one on the fine structure constant, commonly denoted by the Greek letter alpha (α), a “dimensionless entity” with a value of 137 that is calculated using the speed of light, the Planck’s constant, and the charge of an electron.
It was called The Mysterious Number 137.
Born also had first-hand experience with the politics and power struggles within Indian academia, including Raman’s strained relationship with the institute’s administrative council. Raman’s propensity to change work culture was not received well, according to IISc’s Connect. The chair of the Chemistry department, British professor H.E. Watson was particularly irked by his changes that required large financial investments.
He knocked down Raman’s proposal to give a permanent position to Born, citing a lack of funds. Born left six months after he came to India.
In total, according to Connect, Born gave 30 talks during his time as a Reader in Theoretical Physics during his time at the newly established IISc Physics department, both within and outside the institute. Raman was the only faculty member there at the time and had written to a number of famous international physicists of the time, including Erwin Schrödinger, who famously expressed his regret at not having settled in the “land of the Upanishads” because he had just accepted a position in Dublin, Ireland, the magazine said.
A split with the Ramans
The German physicist’s legacy lives on both within and outside of academia. For instance, according to the 2005 book The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born by Nancy Greenspan, Born was close friends with Albert Einstein. Not only did they have deep discussions about world peace during the First World War, they also played music together—Born on the piano and Einstein on the violin.
After reading the book, historian Indira Chowdhury commented in her 2008 Mid-Day article that it looked like, to Born, Raman seemed like a prince out of “1001 Nights, young and slim with a sparkling, intelligent face, wearing a fine white muslin turban with a gold braid on a dark head”.
As for Raman’s relationship with Born, it persisted for a while, until the former started to disagree with Born’s lattice theory work on how crystalline solids come together and vibrate in a structure. Raman felt that Born’s theories disagreed with his observations, according to Connect. The professional disagreement leaked into their personal lives.
According to Connect, Born and his wife met Raman only twice after they left IISc. The first, it said was at the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the Raman Effect in France, and, the second, at a congregation of Nobel laureates in Germany. Born commented on their loss of friendship with Raman’s wife, Lokasundari. “Hedi and I regret all this and particularly the split between us and Lady Raman, whom we loved dearly,” Born wrote in his book.
However, beyond academia, the nondescript bungalow tucked away on the campus is a testament to the fact that the memories of Born’s time at the university campus have largely faded. There is very little information available to the public and ThePrint’s efforts to access the archives are still ongoing.
“I think he was quite happy to be in the physics department here. He would have liked to continue, but it wasn’t possible due to various reasons,” said Professor Arnab Rai Choudhuri, an astrophysicist at IISc.
“I think some very good students worked with him, like Nagendra Nath, who later became known for his work with Raman. But not much is known today about Born’s time here, except for mostly what is in his autobiography.”
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
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