1. Max Planck is known for the Planck constant, which is of foundational importance for quantum physics, and which he used to derive a set of units, today called Planck units, expressed only in terms of fundamental physical constants.
57 Facts About Max Planck
1. 2.
Max Planck was twice president of the German scientific institution Kaiser Wilhelm Society.
3.
Max Planck's paternal great-grandfather and grandfather were both theology professors in Gottingen; his father was a law professor at the University of Kiel and Munich.
4.
Max Planck was born in 1858 in Kiel, Holstein, to Johann Julius Wilhelm Max Planck and his second wife, Emma Patzig.
5.
Max Planck was baptized with the name of Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck; of his given names, Marx was indicated as the "appellation name".
6.
However, by the age of ten he signed with the name Max Planck and used this for the rest of his life.
7.
Max Planck was the sixth child in the family, though two of his siblings were from his father's first marriage.
8.
In 1867 the family moved to Munich, and Planck enrolled in the Maximilians gymnasium school.
9.
Max Planck took singing lessons and played piano, organ and cello, and composed songs and operas.
10.
Under professor Philipp von Jolly's supervision, Max Planck performed the only experiments of his scientific career, studying the diffusion of hydrogen through heated platinum, but transferred to theoretical physics.
11.
Max Planck recalls that in 1878, Jolly argued that physics was almost complete, being a "highly developed, nearly fully matured science, that through the crowning achievement of the discovery of the principle of conservation of energy will arguably soon take its final stable form".
12.
Max Planck 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.
13.
In October 1878, Max Planck passed his qualifying exams and in February 1879 defended his dissertation Uber den zweiten Hauptsatz der mechanischen Warmetheorie.
14.
Max Planck briefly taught mathematics and physics at his former school in Munich.
15.
Max Planck then presented his thesis called Gleichgewichtszustande isotroper Korper in verschiedenen Temperaturen, which earned him a habilitation.
16.
Max Planck proposed a thermodynamic basis for Svante Arrhenius's theory of electrolytic dissociation.
17.
In 1907 Max Planck was offered Ludwig Boltzmann's position in Vienna, but turned it down to stay in Berlin.
18.
Max Planck was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1914.
19.
Max Planck retired from Berlin on 10 January 1926, and was succeeded by Erwin Schrodinger.
20.
Max Planck was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1926 and the American Philosophical Society in 1933.
21.
Max Planck 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".
22.
Thanks to his initiative, the various local Physical Societies of Germany merged in 1898 to form the German Physical Society ; from 1905 to 1909 Max Planck was the president.
23.
Clausius, whose work Max Planck read as a young student during his stay in Berlin, successfully applied this new law of nature to mechanical, thermoelectric and chemical processes.
24.
Furthermore, Max Planck dealt intensively with the new concept of entropy and emphasized that entropy is not only a property of a physical system, but at the same time a measure of the irreversibility of a process: If entropy is generated in a process, it is irreversible, since entropy cannot be destroyed according to the second law.
25.
Max Planck presented this fact in detail in 1887 in a series of treatises entitled "On the Principle of the Increase of Entropy".
26.
Max Planck therefore chose equilibrium processes as his research focus and, based on his habilitation thesis, researched the coexistence of aggregate states and the equilibrium of gas reactions, for example.
27.
Max Planck was unaware of these essays, and they did not appear in German until 1892.
28.
However, both scientists approached the topic in different ways, while Max Planck dealt with irreversible processes, Gibbs looked at equilibria.
29.
In 1894, Max Planck turned his attention to the problem of black-body radiation.
30.
Max Planck revised his approach and now derived the first version of the famous Planck black-body radiation law, which described clearly the experimentally observed black-body spectrum.
31.
Where is the Max Planck constant, known as Max Planck's action quantum, and is the frequency of the radiation.
32.
The discovery of the Max Planck constant enabled him to define a new universal set of physical units, all based on fundamental physical constants, upon which much of quantum theory is based.
33.
Subsequently, Max Planck tried to grasp the meaning of energy quanta, but to no avail.
34.
Max Planck was among the few who immediately recognized the significance of the special theory of relativity.
35.
Max Planck contributed considerably to extend the special theory of relativity.
36.
Max Planck was unwilling to discard completely Maxwell's theory of electrodynamics.
37.
Meanwhile, Max 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.
38.
In 1915, when Italy was still a neutral power, Max Planck voted successfully for a scientific paper from Italy, which received a prize from the Prussian Academy of Sciences, where Max Planck was one of four permanent presidents.
39.
In 1926, Max Planck became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
40.
Max 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".
41.
Max Planck witnessed many Jewish friends and colleagues expelled from their positions and humiliated, and hundreds of scientists emigrate from Nazi Germany.
42.
Max Planck hoped the crisis would abate soon and the political situation would improve.
43.
In May 1933 Max Planck requested and received an interview with the recently appointed Chancellor of Germany Adolf Hitler to discuss the issue, telling him that the "forced emigration of Jews would kill German science and Jews could be good Germans", to which the chancellor replied "but we don't have anything against the Jews, only against communists".
44.
One year later, Max Planck, having been the president of the KWG since 1930, organized in a somewhat provocative style an official commemorative meeting for Haber.
45.
Max Planck succeeded in secretly enabling a number of Jewish scientists to continue working in institutes of the KWG for several years.
46.
Max Planck 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.
47.
Max Planck was tried and sentenced to death by the People's Court in October 1944.
48.
In March 1887, Max Planck married Marie Merck, sister of a school fellow, and moved with her into a sublet apartment in Kiel.
49.
Soon the Max Planck home became a social and cultural center.
50.
In March 1911 Max Planck married his second wife, Marga von Hoesslin ; in December his fifth child Hermann was born.
51.
Max Planck's sister died the same way two years later, after having married Grete's widower.
52.
Max Planck was buried in the old Stadtfriedhof in Gottingen.
53.
Max Planck was a member of the Lutheran Church in Germany.
54.
Max Planck was very tolerant toward alternative views and religions.
55.
Max Planck 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.
56.
Max Planck was a churchwarden from 1920 until his death, and believed in an almighty, all-knowing, beneficent God.
57.
Heilbron further relates that when asked about his religious affiliation, Max Planck replied that although he had always been deeply religious, he did not believe "in a personal God, let alone a Christian God".