Max Planck Wikipedia

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, ForMemRS[1] (German: [ˈplaŋk];[2] English: /ˈplæŋk/;[3] 23 April 1858
– 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him
the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.[4]

Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on
his role as the originator of quantum theory,[5] which revolutionized human understanding of
atomic and subatomic processes. In 1948, the German scientific institution the Kaiser Wilhelm
Society (of which Planck was twice president) was renamed the Max Planck Society (MPS). The MPS
now includes 83 institutions representing a wide range of scientific directions.

Contents

1 Life and career

1.1 Academic career

1.2 Family

1.3 Professor at Berlin University

1.4 Black-body radiation

1.5 Einstein and the theory of relativity

1.6 First World War

1.7 Post-war and the Weimar Republic

1.8 Quantum mechanics

1.9 Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War

2 Religious views

3 Publications

4 See also

5 References

6 Sources

7 External links

Life and career

Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family. His paternal great-grandfather and grandfather
were both theology professors in Göttingen; his father was a law professor at the University of
Kiel[6] and Munich. One of his uncles was also a judge.[7]
Max Planck's signature at ten years of age

Planck was born in Kiel, Holstein, to Johann Julius Wilhelm Planck and his second wife, Emma Patzig.
He was baptized with the name of Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck; of his given names, Marx (a now
obsolete variant of Markus or maybe simply an error for Max, which is actually short for Maximilian)
was indicated as the "appellation name".[8] However, by the age of ten he signed with the name
Max and used this for the rest of his life.[9]

He was the 6th child in the family, though two of his siblings were from his father's first marriage.
War was common during Planck's early years and among his earliest memories was the marching of
Prussian and Austrian troops into Kiel during the Second Schleswig War in 1864.[7] In 1867 the
family moved to Munich, and Planck enrolled in the Maximilians gymnasium school, where he came
under the tutelage of Hermann Müller, a mathematician who took an interest in the youth, and
taught him astronomy and mechanics as well as mathematics. It was from Müller that Planck first
learned the principle of conservation of energy. Planck graduated early, at age 17.[10] This is how
Planck first came in contact with the field of physics.

Planck was gifted when it came to music. He took singing lessons and played piano, organ and cello,
and composed songs and operas. However, instead of music he chose to study physics.

Planck as a young man, 1878

The Munich physics professor Philipp von Jolly advised Planck against going into physics, saying, "in
this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes."[11]
Planck replied that he did not wish to discover new things, but only to understand the known
fundamentals of the field, and so began his studies in 1874 at the University of Munich. Under Jolly's
supervision, Planck performed the only experiments of his scientific career, studying the diffusion of
hydrogen through heated platinum, but transferred to theoretical physics.

In 1877 he went to the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin for a year of study with physicists
Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Kirchhoff and mathematician Karl Weierstrass. He wrote that
Helmholtz was never quite prepared, spoke slowly, miscalculated endlessly, and bored his listeners,
while Kirchhoff spoke in carefully prepared lectures which were dry and monotonous. He soon
became close friends with Helmholtz. While there he undertook a program of mostly self-study of
Clausius's writings, which led him to choose thermodynamics as his field.
In October 1878 Planck passed his qualifying exams and in February 1879 defended his dissertation,
Über den zweiten Hauptsatz der mechanischen Wärmetheorie (On the second law of
thermodynamics). He briefly taught mathematics and physics at his former school in Munich.

By the year 1880, Planck had obtained the two highest academic degrees offered in Europe. The first
was a doctorate degree after he completed his paper detailing his research and theory of
thermodynamics.[7] He then presented his thesis called Gleichgewichtszustände isotroper Körper in
verschiedenen Temperaturen (Equilibrium states of isotropic bodies at different temperatures),
which earned him a habilitation.

Academic career

With the completion of his habilitation thesis, Planck became an unpaid Privatdozent (German
academic rank comparable to lecturer/assistant professor) in Munich, waiting until he was offered
an academic position. Although he was initially ignored by the academic community, he furthered
his work on the field of heat theory and discovered one after another the same thermodynamical
formalism as Gibbs without realizing it. Clausius's ideas on entropy occupied a central role in his
work.

In April 1885 the University of Kiel appointed Planck as associate professor of theoretical physics.
Further work on entropy and its treatment, especially as applied in physical chemistry, followed. He
published his Treatise on Thermodynamics in 1897.[12] He proposed a thermodynamic basis for
Svante Arrhenius's theory of electrolytic dissociation.

In 1889 he was named the successor to Kirchhoff's position at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in

Berlin[13] – presumably thanks to Helmholtz's intercession – and by 1892 became a full professor. In
1907 Planck was offered Boltzmann's position in Vienna, but turned it down to stay in Berlin. During
1909, as a University of Berlin professor, he was invited to become the Ernest Kempton Adams
Lecturer in Theoretical Physics at Columbia University in New York City. A series of his lectures were
translated and co-published by Columbia University professor A. P. Wills.[14] He retired from Berlin
on 10 January 1926,[15] and was succeeded by Erwin Schrödinger.[16]

Family

In March 1887 Planck married Marie Merck (1861–1909), sister of a school fellow, and moved with
her into a sublet apartment in Kiel. They had four children: Karl (1888–1916), the twins Emma
(1889–1919) and Grete (1889–1917), and Erwin (1893–1945).

After the apartment in Berlin, the Planck family lived in a villa in Berlin-Grunewald,
Wangenheimstrasse 21. Several other professors from University of Berlin lived nearby, among them
theologian Adolf von Harnack, who became a close friend of Planck. Soon the Planck home became a
social and cultural center. Numerous well-known scientists, such as Albert Einstein, Otto Hahn and
Lise Meitner were frequent visitors. The tradition of jointly performing music had already been
established in the home of Helmholtz.

After several happy years, in July 1909 Marie Planck died, possibly from tuberculosis. In March 1911
Planck married his second wife, Marga von Hoesslin (1882–1948); in December his fifth child
Hermann was born.

During the First World War Planck's second son Erwin was taken prisoner by the French in 1914,
while his oldest son Karl was killed in action at Verdun. Grete died in 1917 while giving birth to her
first child. Her sister died the same way two years later, after having married Grete's widower. Both
granddaughters survived and were named after their mothers. Planck endured these losses stoically.

In January 1945, Erwin, to whom he had been particularly close, was sentenced to death by the Nazi
Volksgerichtshof because of his participation in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in July 1944.
Erwin was executed on 23 January 1945.[17]

Professor at Berlin University

As a professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, Planck joined the local Physical

Society. He later wrote about this time: "In those days I was essentially the only theoretical physicist
there, whence things were not so easy for me, because I started mentioning entropy, but this was
not quite fashionable, since it was regarded as a mathematical spook".[18] Thanks to his initiative,
the various local Physical Societies of Germany merged in 1898 to form the German Physical Society
(Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft, DPG); from 1905 to 1909 Planck was the president.

Plaque at the Humboldt University of Berlin: "Max Planck, discoverer of the elementary quantum of
action h, taught in this building from 1889 to 1928."

Planck started a six-semester course of lectures on theoretical physics, "dry, somewhat impersonal"
according to Lise Meitner, "using no notes, never making mistakes, never faltering; the best lecturer
I ever heard" according to an English participant, James R. Partington, who continues: "There were
always many standing around the room. As the lecture-room was well heated and rather close, some
of the listeners would from time to time drop to the floor, but this did not disturb the lecture".
Planck did not establish an actual "school"; the number of his graduate students was only about 20,
among them:

1897 Max Abraham (1875–1922)

1903 Max von Laue (1879–1960)

1904 Moritz Schlick (1882–1936)

1906 Walther Meissner (1882–1974)

1907 Fritz Reiche (1883–1960)

1912 Walter Schottky (1886–1976)

1914 Walther Bothe (1891–1957)[19]

Black-body radiation

In 1894 Planck turned his attention to the problem of black-body radiation. He had been
commissioned by electric companies to create maximum light from lightbulbs with minimum
energy.[citation needed] The problem had been stated by Kirchhoff in 1859: "how does the intensity
of the electromagnetic radiation emitted by a black body (a perfect absorber, also known as a cavity
radiator) depend on the frequency of the radiation (i.e., the color of the light) and the temperature
of the body?". The question had been explored experimentally, but no theoretical treatment agreed
with experimental values. Wilhelm Wien proposed Wien's law, which correctly predicted the
behaviour at high frequencies, but failed at low frequencies. The Rayleigh–Jeans law, another
approach to the problem, agreed with experimental results at low frequencies, but created what
was later known as the "ultraviolet catastrophe" at high frequencies. However, contrary to many
textbooks this was not a motivation for Planck.[20]

Planck's first proposed solution to the problem in 1899 followed from what Planck called the
"principle of elementary disorder", which allowed him to derive Wien's law from a number of
assumptions about the entropy of an ideal oscillator, creating what was referred-to as the Wien–
Planck law. Soon it was found that experimental evidence did not confirm the new law at all, to
Planck's frustration. Planck revised his approach, deriving the first version of the famous Planck
black-body radiation law, which described the experimentally observed black-body spectrum well. It
was first proposed in a meeting of the DPG on 19 October 1900 and published in 1901. This first
derivation did not include energy quantisation, and did not use statistical mechanics, to which he
held an aversion. In November 1900, Planck revised this first approach, relying on Boltzmann's
statistical interpretation of the second law of thermodynamics as a way of gaining a more
fundamental understanding of the principles behind his radiation law. As Planck was deeply
suspicious of the philosophical and physical implications of such an interpretation of Boltzmann's
approach, his recourse to them was, as he later put it, "an act of despair ... I was ready to sacrifice
any of my previous convictions about physics."[20]

The central assumption behind his new derivation, presented to the DPG on 14 December 1900, was
the supposition, now known as the Planck postulate, that electromagnetic energy could be emitted
only in quantized form, in other words, the energy could only be a multiple of an elementary unit:

{\displaystyle E=h\nu }E=h\nu

where h is Planck's constant, also known as Planck's action quantum (introduced already in 1899),
and ν is the frequency of the radiation. Note that the elementary units of energy discussed here are
represented by hν and not simply by ν. Physicists now call these quanta photons, and a photon of
frequency ν will have its own specific and unique energy. The total energy at that frequency is then
equal to hν multiplied by the number of photons at that frequency.

Planck in 1918, the year he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on quantum theory

At first Planck considered that quantisation was only "a purely formal assumption ... actually I did
not think much about it..."; nowadays this assumption, incompatible with classical physics, is
regarded as the birth of quantum physics and the greatest intellectual accomplishment of Planck's
career (Ludwig Boltzmann had been discussing in a theoretical paper in 1877 the possibility that the
energy states of a physical system could be discrete). The discovery of Planck's constant enabled him
to define a new universal set of physical units (such as the Planck length and the Planck mass), all
based on fundamental physical constants upon which much of quantum theory is based. In
recognition of Planck's fundamental contribution to a new branch of physics, he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Physics for 1918 (he actually received the award in 1919).[21][22]

Subsequently, Planck tried to grasp the meaning of energy quanta, but to no avail. "My unavailing
attempts to somehow reintegrate the action quantum into classical theory extended over several
years and caused me much trouble." Even several years later, other physicists like Rayleigh, Jeans,
and Lorentz set Planck's constant to zero in order to align with classical physics, but Planck knew well
that this constant had a precise nonzero value. "I am unable to understand Jeans' stubbornness – he
is an example of a theoretician as should never be existing, the same as Hegel was for philosophy. So
much the worse for the facts if they don't fit."[23]

Max Born wrote about Planck: "He was, by nature, a conservative mind; he had nothing of the
revolutionary and was thoroughly skeptical about speculations. Yet his belief in the compelling force
of logical reasoning from facts was so strong that he did not flinch from announcing the most
revolutionary idea which ever has shaken physics."[1]

Einstein and the theory of relativity

In 1905, the three epochal papers by Albert Einstein were published in the journal Annalen der
Physik. Planck was among the few who immediately recognized the significance of the special theory
of relativity. Thanks to his influence, this theory was soon widely accepted in Germany. Planck also
contributed considerably to extend the special theory of relativity. For example, he recast the theory
in terms of classical action.[24]

Einstein's hypothesis of light quanta (photons), based on Heinrich Hertz's 1887 discovery (and
further investigation by Philipp Lenard) of the photoelectric effect, was initially rejected by Planck.
He was unwilling to discard completely Maxwell's theory of electrodynamics. "The theory of light
would be thrown back not by decades, but by centuries, into the age when Christiaan Huygens dared
to fight against the mighty emission theory of Isaac Newton ..."[25]
In 1910, Einstein pointed out the anomalous behavior of specific heat at low temperatures as
another example of a phenomenon which defies explanation by classical physics. Planck and Nernst,
seeking to clarify the increasing number of contradictions, organized the First Solvay Conference
(Brussels 1911). At this meeting Einstein was able to convince Planck.

Meanwhile, Planck had been appointed dean of Berlin University, whereby it was possible for him to
call Einstein to Berlin and establish a new professorship for him (1914). Soon the two scientists
became close friends and met frequently to play music together.

First World War

At the onset of the First World War Planck endorsed the general excitement of the public, writing
that, "Besides much that is horrible, there is also much that is unexpectedly great and beautiful: the
smooth solution of the most difficult domestic political problems by the unification of all parties
(and) ... the extolling of everything good and noble."[26][27]

Nonetheless, Planck refrained from the extremes of nationalism. In 1915, at a time when Italy was
about to join the Allied Powers, he voted successfully for a scientific paper from Italy, which received
a prize from the Prussian Academy of Sciences, where Planck was one of four permanent presidents.

Planck also signed the infamous "Manifesto of the 93 intellectuals", a pamphlet of polemic war
propaganda (while Einstein retained a strictly pacifistic attitude which almost led to his
imprisonment, being spared by his Swiss citizenship). But in 1915 Planck, after several meetings with
Dutch physicist Lorentz, revoked parts of the Manifesto. Then in 1916 he signed a declaration
against German annexationism.[citation needed]

Post-war and the Weimar Republic

In the turbulent post-war years, Planck, now the highest authority of German physics, issued the
slogan "persevere and continue working" to his colleagues.

In October 1920 he and Fritz Haber established the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft
(Emergency Organization of German Science), aimed at providing financial support for scientific
research. A considerable portion of the money the organization would distribute was raised abroad.

Planck also held leading positions at Berlin University, the Prussian Academy of Sciences, the
German Physical Society and the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (which in 1948 became the Max Planck
Society). During this time economic conditions in Germany were such that he was hardly able to
conduct research. In 1926 Planck became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of
Arts and Sciences.[28]

During the interwar period, Planck became a member of the Deutsche Volks-Partei (German
People's Party), the party of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Gustav Stresemann, which aspired to liberal
aims for domestic policy and rather revisionistic aims for politics around the world.

Planck disagreed with the introduction of universal suffrage and later expressed the view that the
Nazi dictatorship resulted from "the ascent of the rule of the crowds".[29]

Quantum mechanics

From left to right: W. Nernst, A. Einstein, M. Planck, R.A. Millikan and von Laue at a dinner given by
von Laue in Berlin on 11 November 1931

At the end of the 1920s Bohr, Heisenberg and Pauli had worked out the Copenhagen interpretation
of quantum mechanics, but it was rejected by Planck, and by Schrödinger, Laue, and Einstein as well.
Planck expected that wave mechanics would soon render quantum theory—his own child—
unnecessary. This was not to be the case, however. Further work only cemented quantum theory,
even against his and Einstein's philosophical revulsions. Planck experienced the truth of his own
earlier observation from his struggle with the older views in his younger years: "A new scientific
truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather
because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."[30]

Nazi dictatorship and the Second World War

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Planck was 74. He witnessed many Jewish friends and
colleagues expelled from their positions and humiliated, and hundreds of scientists emigrate from
Nazi Germany. Again he tried to "persevere and continue working" and asked scientists who were
considering emigration to remain in Germany. Nevertheless, he did help his nephew, the economist
Hermann Kranold, to emigrate to London after his arrest.[31] He hoped the crisis would abate soon
and the political situation would improve.

Otto Hahn asked Planck to gather well-known German professors in order to issue a public
proclamation against the treatment of Jewish professors, but Planck replied, "If you are able to
gather today 30 such gentlemen, then tomorrow 150 others will come and speak against it, because
they are eager to take over the positions of the others."[32] Under Planck's leadership, the Kaiser
Wilhelm Society (KWG) avoided open conflict with the Nazi regime, except concerning Fritz Haber.
Planck tried to discuss the issue with Adolf Hitler but was unsuccessful. In the following year, 1934,
Haber died in exile.
One year later, Planck, having been the president of the KWG since 1930, organized in a somewhat
provocative style an official commemorative meeting for Haber. He also succeeded in secretly
enabling a number of Jewish scientists to continue working in institutes of the KWG for several
years. In 1936, his term as president of the KWG ended, and the Nazi government pressured him to
refrain from seeking another term.

As the political climate in Germany gradually became more hostile, Johannes Stark, prominent
exponent of Deutsche Physik ("German Physics", also called "Aryan Physics") attacked Planck,
Sommerfeld and Heisenberg for continuing to teach the theories of Einstein, calling them "white
Jews". The "Hauptamt Wissenschaft" (Nazi government office for science) started an investigation of
Planck's ancestry, claiming that he was "1/16 Jewish", but Planck himself denied it.[33]

Max Planck's grave in Göttingen

In 1938, Planck celebrated his 80th birthday. The DPG held a celebration, during which the Max-
Planck medal (founded as the highest medal by the DPG in 1928) was awarded to French physicist
Louis de Broglie. At the end of 1938, the Prussian Academy lost its remaining independence and was
taken over by Nazis (Gleichschaltung). Planck protested by resigning his presidency. He continued to
travel frequently, giving numerous public talks, such as his talk on Religion and Science, and five
years later he was sufficiently fit to climb 3,000-metre peaks in the Alps.

During the Second World War the increasing number of Allied bombing missions against Berlin
forced Planck and his wife to temporarily leave the city and live in the countryside. In 1942 he wrote:
"In me an ardent desire has grown to persevere this crisis and live long enough to be able to witness
the turning point, the beginning of a new rise." In February 1944 his home in Berlin was completely
destroyed by an air raid, annihilating all his scientific records and correspondence. His rural retreat
was threatened by the rapid advance of the Allied armies from both sides.

In 1944, Planck's son Erwin was arrested by the Gestapo following the attempted assassination of
Hitler in the 20 July plot. He was tried and sentenced to death by the People's Court in October
1944. Erwin was hanged at Berlin's Plötzensee Prison in January 1945. The death of his son
destroyed much of Planck's will to live.[34] After the end of the war Planck, his second wife, and his
son by her were brought to a relative in Göttingen, where Planck died on October 4, 1947. His grave
is situated in the old Stadtfriedhof (City Cemetery) in Göttingen.[35]

Religious views

Planck was a member of the Lutheran Church in Germany.[36] He was very tolerant towards
alternative views and religions.[37] In a lecture in 1937 entitled "Religion und Naturwissenschaft"
(Religion and Natural Science) he suggested the importance of these symbols and rituals related
directly with a believer's ability to worship God, but that one must be mindful that the symbols
provide an imperfect illustration of divinity. He criticized atheism for being focused on the derision
of such symbols, while at the same time warned of the over-estimation of the importance of such
symbols by believers.[38]

Planck was tolerant and favorable to all religions. Although he remained in the Lutheran Church, he
did not promote Christian or Biblical views. He believed "the faith in miracles must yield, step by
step, before the steady and firm advance of the facts of science, and its total defeat is undoubtedly a
matter of time." [39]

In his 1937 lecture "Religion and Naturwissenschaft," Planck expressed the view that God is
everywhere present, and held that "the holiness of the unintelligible Godhead is conveyed by the
holiness of symbols." Atheists, he thought, attach too much importance to what are merely symbols.
He was a churchwarden from 1920 until his death, and believed in an almighty, all-knowing,
beneficent God (though not necessarily a personal one). Both science and religion wage a "tireless
battle against skepticism and dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition" with the goal "toward
God!"[39]

Planck said in 1944, "As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to
the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no
matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of
an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must
assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit (orig. geist). This spirit is
the matrix of all matter."[40]

Planck regarded the scientist as a man of imagination and Christian faith. He said: "Both religion and
science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the
end of all considerations… To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice
of every generalized world view".[41]

On the other hand, Planck wrote, "...'to believe' means 'to recognize as a truth,' and the knowledge
of nature, continually advancing on incontestably safe tracks, has made it utterly impossible for a
person possessing some training in natural science to recognize as founded on truth the many
reports of extraordinary occurrences contradicting the laws of nature, of miracles which are still
commonly regarded as essential supports and confirmations of religious doctrines, and which
formerly used to be accepted as facts pure and simple, without doubt or criticism. The belief in
miracles must retreat step by step before relentlessly and reliably progressing science and we
cannot doubt that sooner or later it must vanish completely."[42]

Later in life, Planck's views on God were that of a deist.[43] For example, six months before his death
a rumour started that he had converted to Catholicism, but when questioned what had brought him
to make this step, he declared that, although he had always been deeply religious, he did not believe
"in a personal God, let alone a Christian God."[44]
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck

(1858-1947)

Germanphysicist and 1918 Nobel laureate, who was the originator of the quantum theory.

Introduction.
Max Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame rests primarily on his role as
originator of the quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. This theory
revolutionized our understanding of atomic and subatomic processes, just as Albert Einstein's theory of
relativity revolutionized our understanding of space and time. Together they constitute the fundamental
theories of 20th-century physics. Both have forced man to revise some of his most cherished philosophical
beliefs, and both have led to industrial and military applications that affect every aspect of modern life.

Early life.
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born on April 23, 1858, in Kiel, Germany, the sixth child of a distinguished
jurist and professor of law at the University of Kiel. The long family tradition of devotion to church and state,
excellence in scholarship, incorruptibility, conservatism, idealism, reliability, and generosity became deeply
ingrained in Planck's own life and work. When Planck was nine years old, his father received an appointment
at the University of Munich, and Planck entered the city's renowned Maximilian Gymnasium, where a teacher,
Hermann Muller, stimulated his interest in physics and mathematics. But Planck excelled in all subjects, and
after graduation at age 17 he faced a difficult career decision. He ultimately chose physics over classical
philology or music because he had dispassionately reached the conclusion that it was in physics that his
greatest originality lay. Music, nonetheless, remained an integral part of his life. He possessed the gift of
absolute pitch and was an excellent pianist who daily found serenity and delight at the keyboard, enjoying
especially the works of Schubert and Brahms. He also loved the outdoors, taking long walks each day and
hiking and climbing in the mountains on vacations, even in advanced old age.
Planck entered the University of Munich in the fall of 1874 but found little encouragement there from physics
professor Philipp von Jolly. He spent a year (1877-78) at the University of Berlin, but he was unimpressed by
the lectures of Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, despite their eminence as research
scientists. His intellectual capacities were, however, brought to a focus as the result of his independent
study, especially of Rudolf Clausius' writings on thermodynamics. Returning to Munich, he received his
doctoral degree in July 1879 (the year of Einstein's birth) at the unusually young age of 21. The following
year he completed his Habilitationsschrift (qualifying dissertation) at Munich and became a Privatdozent
(lecturer). In 1885, with the help of his father's professional connections, he was appointed
ausserordentlicher Professor (associate professor) at the University of Kiel. In 1889, after the death of
Kirchhoff, Planck received an appointment to the University of Berlin, where he came to venerate Helmholtz
as a mentor and colleague. In 1892 he was promoted to ordentlicher Professor (full professor). He had only
nine doctoral students altogether, but his Berlin lectures on all branches of theoretical physics went through
many editions and exerted great influence. He remained in Berlin for the rest of his active life.

Planck recalled that his "original decision to devote myself to science was a direct result of the discovery . . .
that the laws of human reasoning coincide with the laws governing the sequences of the impressions we
receive from the world about us; that, therefore, pure reasoning can enable man to gain an insight into the
mechanism of the [world]. . . ." He deliberately decided, in other words, to become a theoretical physicist at
a time when theoretical physics was not yet recognized as a discipline in its own right. But he went further:
he concluded that the existence of physical laws presupposes that the "outside world is something
independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared
. . . as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life."

The first instance of an absolute in nature that impressed Planck deeply, even as a Gymnasium student, was
the law of the conservation of energy, the first law of thermodynamics. Later, during his university years, he
became equally convinced that the entropy law, the second law of thermodynamics, was also an absolute law
of nature. The second law became the subject of his doctoral dissertation at Munich, and it lay at the core of
the researches that led him to discover the quantum of action, now known as Planck's constant h, in 1900.

In 1859-60 Kirchhoff had defined a blackbody as an object that reemits all of the radiant energy incident
upon it; i.e., it is a perfect emitter and absorber of radiation. There was, therefore, something absolute about
blackbody radiation, and by the 1890s various experimental and theoretical attempts had been made to
determine its spectral energy distribution--the curve displaying how much radiant energy is emitted at
different frequencies for a given temperature of the blackbody. Planck was particularly attracted to the
formula found in 1896 by his colleague Wilhelm Wien at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) in
Berlin-Charlottenburg, and he subsequently made a series of attempts to derive "Wien's law" on the basis of
the second law of thermodynamics. By October 1900, however, other colleagues at the PTR, the
experimentalists Otto Richard Lummer, Ernst Pringsheim, Heinrich Rubens, and Ferdinand Kurlbaum, had
found definite indications that Wien's law, while valid at high frequencies, broke down completely at low
frequencies.

Planck learned of these results just before a meeting of the German Physical Society on October 19. He knew
how the entropy of the radiation had to depend mathematically upon its energy in the high-frequency region
if Wien's law held there. He also saw what this dependence had to be in the low-frequency region in order to
reproduce the experimental results there. Planck guessed, therefore, that he should try to combine these two
expressions in the simplest way possible, and to transform the result into a formula relating the energy of the
radiation to its frequency.

The result, which is known as Planck's radiation law, was hailed as indisputably correct. To Planck, however,
it was simply a guess, a "lucky intuition." If it was to be taken seriously, it had to be derived somehow from
first principles. That was the task to which Planck immediately directed his energies, and by December 14,
1900, he had succeeded--but at great cost. To achieve his goal, Planck found that he had to relinquish one of
his own most cherished beliefs, that the second law of thermodynamics was an absolute law of nature.
Instead he had to embrace Ludwig Boltzmann's interpretation, that the second law was a statistical law. In
addition, Planck had to assume that the oscillators comprising the blackbody and re-emitting the radiant
energy incident upon them could not absorb this energy continuously but only in discrete amounts, in quanta
of energy; only by statistically distributing these quanta, each containing an amount of energy h proportional
to its frequency, over all of the oscillators present in the blackbody could Planck derive the formula he had hit
upon two months earlier. He adduced additional evidence for the importance of his formula by using it to
evaluate the constant h (his value was 6.55 10-27 erg-second, close to the modern value), as well as the so-
called Boltzmann constant (the fundamental constant in kinetic theory and statistical mechanics), Avogadro's
number, and the charge of the electron. As time went on physicists recognized ever more clearly that--
because Planck's constant was not zero but had a small but finite value--the microphysical world, the world
of atomic dimensions, could not in principle be described by ordinary classical mechanics. A profound
revolution in physical theory was in the making.

Planck's concept of energy quanta, in other words, conflicted fundamentally with all past physical theory. He
was driven to introduce it strictly by the force of his logic; he was, as one historian put it, a reluctant
revolutionary. Indeed, it was years before the far-reaching consequences of Planck's achievement were
generally recognized, and in this Einstein played a central role. In 1905, independently of Planck's work,
Einstein argued that under certain circumstances radiant energy itself seemed to consist of quanta (light
quanta, later called photons), and in 1907 he showed the generality of the quantum hypothesis by using it to
interpret the temperature dependence of the specific heats of solids. In 1909 Einstein introduced the wave-
particle duality into physics. In October 1911 he was among the group of prominent physicists who attended
the first Solvay conference in Brussels. The discussions there stimulated Henri Poincare to provide a
mathematical proof that Planck's radiation law necessarily required the introduction of quanta--a proof that
converted James (later Sir James) Jeans and others into supporters of the quantum theory. In 1913 Niels
Bohr also contributed greatly to its establishment through his quantum theory of the hydrogen atom.
Ironically, Planck himself was one of the last to struggle for a return to classical theory, a stance he later
regarded not with regret but as a means by which he had thoroughly convinced himself of the necessity of
the quantum theory. Opposition to Einstein's radical light quantum hypothesis of 1905 persisted until after
the discovery of the Compton effect in 1922.

Later life.
Planck was 42 years old in 1900 when he made the famous discovery that in 1918 won him the Nobel Prize
for Physics and that brought him many other honours. It is not surprising that he subsequently made no
discoveries of comparable importance. Nevertheless, he continued to contribute at a high level to various
branches of optics, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, physical chemistry, and other fields. He was
also the first prominent physicist to champion Einstein's special theory of relativity (1905). "The velocity of
light is to the Theory of Relativity," Planck remarked, "as the elementary quantum of action is to the
Quantum Theory; it is its absolute core." In 1914 Planck and the physical chemist Walther Hermann Nernst
succeeded in bringing Einstein to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin, and after the war, in
1919, arrangements were made for Max von Laue, Planck's favourite student, to come to Berlin as well.
When Planck retired in 1928, another prominent theoretical physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, the originator of
wave mechanics, was chosen as his successor. For a time, therefore, Berlin shone brilliantly as a centre of
theoretical physics--until darkness enveloped it in January 1933 with the ascent of Adolf Hitler to power.
In his later years, Planck devoted more and more of his writings to philosophical, aesthetic, and religious
questions. Together with Einstein and Schrodinger, he remained adamantly opposed to the indeterministic,
statistical worldview introduced by Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and others into physics after the
advent of quantum mechanics in 1925-26. Such a view was not in harmony with Planck's deepest intuitions
and beliefs. The physical universe, Planck argued, is an objective entity existing independently of man; the
observer and the observed are not intimately coupled, as Bohr and his school would have it.

Planck became permanent secretary of the mathematics and physics sections of the Prussian Academy of
Sciences in 1912 and held that position until 1938; he was also president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (now
the Max Planck Society) from 1930 to 1937. These offices and others placed Planck in a position of great
authority, especially among German physicists; seldom were his decisions or advice questioned. His
authority, however, stemmed fundamentally not from the official appointments he held but from his personal
moral force. His fairness, integrity, and wisdom were beyond question. It was completely in character that
Planck went directly to Hitler in an attempt to reverse Hitler's devastating racial policies and that he chose to
remain in Germany during the Nazi period to try to preserve what he could of German physics.

Planck was a man of indomitable will. Had he been less stoic, and had he had less philosophical and religious
conviction, he could scarcely have withstood the tragedies that entered his life after age 50. In 1909, his first
wife, Marie Merck, the daughter of a Munich banker, died after 22 years of happy marriage, leaving Planck
with two sons and twin daughters. The elder son, Karl, was killed in action in 1916. The following year,
Margarete, one of his daughters, died in childbirth, and in 1919 the same fate befell Emma, his other
daughter. World War II brought further tragedy. Planck's house in Berlin was completely destroyed by bombs
in 1944. Far worse, the younger son, Erwin, was implicated in the attempt made on Hitler's life on July 20,
1944, and in early 1945 he died a horrible death at the hands of the Gestapo. That merciless act destroyed
Planck's will to live. At war's end, American officers took Planck and his second wife, Marga von Hoesslin,
whom he had married in 1910 and by whom he had had one son, to Gottingen. There, on October 4, 1947, in
his 89th year, he died. Death, in the words of James Franck, came to him "as a redemption."

BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Editions of Planck's works include The Theory of Heat Radiation (1914, reprinted 1991; originally published in
German, 2nd rev. ed., 1913); Where Is Science Going?, trans. from German (1932, reprinted 1981),
discussing free will and determinism; and The Philosophy of Physics, trans. from German (1936, reissued
1963). Planck described his life and work in his Scientific Autobiography, and Other Papers, trans. from
German (1949, reissued 1968). Henry Lowood (compiler), Max Planck: A Bibliography of His Non-Technical
Writings (1977), lists more than 600 articles published between 1879 and 1976.
Hans Kangro, "Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck," in Charles Coulston Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific
Biography, vol. 11 (1975), pp. 7-17, contains an excellent short biography. Armin Hermann, Max Planck in
Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (1973); and Hans Hartmann, Max Planck als Mensch und Denker
(1953, reissued 1964), are biographies in German. J.L. Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max
Planck as Spokesman for German Science (1986), concentrates on the moral dilemmas Planck faced.

Technical books that treat Planck's work and the history of quantum physics include Edmund Whittaker, A
History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity, rev. and enlarged ed., vol. 2, The Modern Theories, 1900-
1926 (1953, reissued 1987); Max Jammer, The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics (1966,
reissued 1989); Armin Hermann, The Genesis of Quantum Theory (1899-1913) (1971; originally published in
German, 1969); Roger H. Stuewer, The Compton Effect: Turning Point in Physics (1975); Hans Kangro, Early
History of Planck's Radiation Law (1976; originally published in German, 1970); and Thomas S. Kuhn, Black-
Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, 1894-1912 (1978, reprinted 1987).

Nontechnical books include Barbara Lovett Cline, The Questioners: Physicists and the Quantum Theory
(1965); Emilio Segre, From X-Rays to Quarks: Modern Physicists and Their Discoveries (1980); Ilse
Rosenthal-Schneider, Reality and Scientific Truth: Discussions with Einstein, von Laue, and Planck (1980);
and Alex Keller, The Infancy of Atomic Physics: Hercules in His Cradle (1983). Especially noteworthy are
three articles by Martin J. Klein: "Max Planck and the Beginning of the Quantum Theory," Archive for History
of Exact Sciences, 1(5):459-479 (1962), "Planck, Entropy, and Quanta, 1901-1906," The Natural
Philosopher, 1:83-108 (1963), and "Thermodynamics and Quanta in Planck's Work," Physics Today, 19:23-32
(1966).
 List of things named after Max Planck
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This is a list of things named for the German scientist Max Planck:

Contents

 1Physics
o 1.1Quantum mechanics
o 1.2Cosmology
 2Other
o 2.1Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Physics[edit]
 Fokker–Planck equation
 Nernst–Planck equation
 Kelvin–Planck statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
 Massieu–Planck potentials, see Planck potential
 Planck function, see either Planck radiation formula or Planck potential
 Planck potential, see Free entropy
 Planck proposition, Planck statement; see Kelvin–Planck statement
 Planckian locus
Quantum mechanics[edit]

 Planck constant, Planck's constant

 Planck postulate
 Planck's law of black body radiation
 Planck–Einstein relation
 Planck particle
Cosmology[edit]

 Planck units
o Planck energy
o Planck length
o Planck mass
o Planck time
o Planck temperature
o Planck charge
 Derived Planck units
o Planck acceleration
o Planck current
o Planck power
o Planck density
 Planck epoch
 Planck particle
 Planck postulate
 Planck scale
 Trans-Planckian problem

Other[edit]
 1069 Planckia, asteroid
 Max Planck Society
 Planck's principle
 Planck (crater) on the Moon
 Planck Surveyor, space observatory
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft[edit]

 Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, see Max Planck Society