Physicist Max Born is singer Olivia Newton-John’s grandfather
It’s one of those random facts, perhaps meaningless, that I nevertheless find interesting.
From Born’s Wiki page:
Max Born was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his “fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function”…
In January 1933, the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. In May, Born became one of six Jewish professors at Göttingen who were suspended with pay; Franck had already resigned. In twelve years they had built Göttingen into one of the world’s foremost centres for physics. Born began looking for a new job, writing to Maria Göppert-Mayer at Johns Hopkins University and Rudi Ladenburg at Princeton University. He accepted an offer from St John’s College, Cambridge. At Cambridge, he wrote a popular science book, The Restless Universe, and a textbook, Atomic Physics, that soon became a standard text, going through seven editions. His family soon settled into life in England, with his daughters Irene and Gritli becoming engaged to Welshman Brinley (Bryn) Newton-John (Olivia Newton-John’s parents; Born is Olivia’s grandfather and Irene is her mother) and Englishman Maurice Pryce respectively.
Not only that, but Olivia Newton-John is not the only one of Born’s descendants in the music or acting business. There are more:
Born was survived by his wife Hedi and their children Irene, Gritli and Gustav. Singer Olivia Newton-John is a daughter of Irene (1914-2003), while Gustav is the father of musician and academic Georgina Born and actor Max Born (Fellini Satyricon) who are thus also Max’s grandchildren. His great-grandchildren include songwriter Brett Goldsmith, singer Tottie Goldsmith, racing car driver Emerson Newton-John, and singer Chloe Rose Lattanzi.
Well, they say that an aptitude for music and math are often linked.
I quite often used the Born Approximation when dealing with interactions in my research field of ion-molecule collisions. Maybe the inspiration for Olivia’s “Let’s get physical”?? 🙂
Have you ever written about Hedy Lamarr, the 30s screen siren who is credited with helping to develop sophisticated spread spectrum technology which is used in modern radar and communications? Not just “descended from” a scientist.
Yes physicsguy, the Born approximation: the Born approximation consists of taking the incident field in place of the total field as the driving field at each point in the scatterer.
Also the Born-von Karman boundary conditions: are periodic boundary conditions which impose the restriction that a wave function must be periodic on a certain Bravais lattice. The Born–von Karman boundary condition is important in solid state physics for analyzing many features of crystals, such as diffraction and the band gap.
The band gap is at the heart of semiconductor based electronics.
There is tons of stuff like this in which there is linkage that explains why the average person has less chance than others they thought were similar…
FOAF:
I understand that Hedy Lamarr was married for a time to an arms manufacturer (I think in Austria), and he often took her to meetings as “eye candy.” It turns out that brain of hers was absorbing like a sponge all the time.
“they say that an aptitude for music and math are often linked.”
And computer programming. I noted that just from observation early in my software career, decades ago. It was supported by the fact that I can get by but am not *really* good in either field. Above average ability compared to the human race at large, probably, but not really that much above.
re Hedy Lamarr, I put up a post about her here:
https://ricochet.com/members/davidfoster/blog/main-feed-posts/
Wow! That is cool. How in the hell did you stumble across such a crazy random thing?
Great article, David. While it might be stretching it to say Lamarr “invented”, or co-invented, spread spectrum it is certainly eye-catching that a glamorous Hollywood actress was doing serious work on what was then a sophisticated, advanced technology. Actually it is still sophisticated now but in much wider use.
Re Ms Lamarr: There’s that Blank Slate at work again. Just think of the incredible Nurture she must have received.
So… Olivia Newton-John is Born, again?
}}} The band gap is at the heart of semiconductor based electronics.
And The Gap Band was at the heart of 70s Funk music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bACKLW19XdE
Linkage…
The world just gets stranger and stranger… 😛
@OBloodyHell:
Not *Again*.
Every. Single. Time.
🙂
Re Ms Lamarr:
She was the Jewish daughter of a Galician Jewish Bank Director and Hungarian Jewish concert pianist mother… She *had* been married to an arms merchant (half Jewish) after starting out her career in soft porn… by WWII she was banging one of the wealthiest arms contractors in America (Howard Hughes) and she had a more than personal grudge against the Germans — along with just about every agent and studio boss in Hollywood — itself an industry full of technical wizards.
So she had the brains, the motivation, and the contacts to pull it off. She even had some arms industry background — apparently she used to go along with her first arms dealer husband on sales calls — whether by inclination or because he wouldn’t let her out of his sight I don’t know. According to Wikipedia, anyway, he was a right Bastard.
Fiendishly intelligent, driven, and highly motivated and with the resources of a #@$$%-struck Howard Hughes and the likes of Louis B Mayer behind her… Gonnections.. as the Arnold Rothstein character in Gatsby says. Gotta have Gonnections.
Anyway it wasn’t implemented until well after the war and not using the electromechanical player piano idea she came up with. So it’s an idea. A good leap of the imagination. Would have occurred and possibly did occur to others under conditions of stricter classification / military discipline — voice scramblers already did similar randomization thing to signal pre-modulation that frequency-hopping spread spectrum does to carrier frequency assignment post-modulation. To any random Boffin working on these, it would not have been a huge leap of the imagination. To someone non-technical like her, it absolutely could have been a pretty genius mental flash.
A good story. Like the Black Ladies who ‘saved’ Apollo. Or something.
Too late to make her the Patron Saint of the IEEE — not black enough.
ObloodyHell,
You know how to push my buttons. That video looks like a hot time on Venice Beach. In those years I spent a few days on Mission Beach in San Diego. Not quite as cool as Venice. But mostly my nose was in the books.
At the risk of repeating myself (from many months ago) and culturally appropriating, I think this is some of the baddest funk from that era:
Serpentine Fire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoI1XPqXQ90
Love the bass line, horns, and boots stomping the stage. Oh, and the fabulous falsettos.
She was not Can Do! so she must be torn down. Sad.
@Om:
There’s heartwarming inspirational tales and there’s Just So Stories. And there’s in-between. I think we might have an in-betweener here, but closer to the Just-so than the Einstein end of the spectrum.
Can Do! is the great spinner of Ain’t Necessarily So stories.
As a radio DJ, I also enjoyed this fact.
I teased her song “Let’s get physical” as her “Olivia Neutron-Bomb” only to explain my odd choice of words after it played, going into this fact and jolly good word/name play!
I bought a copy of Born’s Atomic Physics while in junior high school, and still have it. Very well written. I liked his exposition on Einstein’s A’s and B’s, about transitions between electron orbitals.
Yes, lots of glamorous Hollywood stars are involved with advanced communications technology, yawn.
“the likes of Louis B Mayer behind her”
Mayer was really known for his mastery of telecommunications technology.
“Can Do! is the great spinner”
He’s rotating, all right.
Wonder how much of Newton-John’s musical talent comes from her Welsh genes.
Those guys can really sing….
As I recall, Lemarr and her collaborator shared their frequency skipping technology with the Navy Dept. as a way to control torpedoes and avoid interference or other techniques used by the Germans to prevent detonations. Naturally they blew her off. Eventually, after the war, they incorporated the principle in their technology.
Lamarr worked on spread spectrum, but, IIRC, the Germans were already experimenting with it in WWI. She may have known some of the researchers.
I’d pair physics with music, and math with languages.
“I’d pair physics with music, and math with languages.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dancing_Wu_Li_Masters
Or you could go totally off-piste 🙂
an aptitude for music and math are often linked.
I’d say music and physics, math and languages. With a good deal of overlap.