Max Planck, the founding father of quantum physics
Max Planck’s childhood was not easy; it was marred by the ravages of war. First in years leading to 1864, when the Second Schleswig War was declared, and later in his adult life, the WWI and WWII combined with atrocities committed by Nazi’s against Jews and later by the Russian Red Army during their occupation of Germany. Despite all this, he had a stable family and he showed his aptitude for everything he tried in his life with a fondness for languages, mathematics, Bible and music. He was the favorite kid in his entire school.
His early struggles made him understand the situation of other young physicists, and he was an encouraging voice to anyone who came up with new scientific ideas. In his middle age, he advocated for the “peculiar” yet eloquent work of young Albert Einstein. He stood against the establishment to find a scientific place for young Lise Meitner, the brilliant Jewish woman who came to Berlin just to hear his physics lecture. Years later she along with Otto Hahn jointly discovered the fission of the uranium nucleus that lead to the discovery nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The world came to know their extraordinary discovery and the 1944 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to Otto Hahn clearly denying Meitner’s share of the Nobel Prize. This was a clear case of gender discrimination against the brilliant physicist.
In early 1909, Max Planck, a giant in the field of physics at that time, gave a series of eight lectures at Columbia University in New York. His mentor Hermann von Helmholtz had given series of lectures at Columbia 15 years earlier. At that time, Einstein was still an unknown figure and his 1905 publication on Special Relativity was revolutionizing idea in physics. Half way through his eighth and final lecture, Planck made a crucial point warning the political dawn of “German” and “Jewish” physics in the devastating decades to come. In the years leading up to WWI and WWI, it became painfully clear that Jewish physicists will be treated deplorably as the political tensions was mounting. Even among many respected German physicists, Einstein’s theory of special relativity did not sit well as it abolished the universal time for all observers. Max Planck admitted that this would spawn headaches. In the next several years, Planck and Einstein had contentious and irreconcilable differences.
Max Planck’s personal life was agonized repeatedly as the scars of wars was personal for him. During the WWI, Planck’s second son was taken as a prisoner by the French in 1914. Years later, in 1945, when Germany was under the Third Reich, his favorite son Erwin Planck was sentenced to death by the Nazis for trying to assassinate the Fuhrer. His standing in the world of physics did not help convince Hitler to spare his son’s life.
Max Planck was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1918, and his philosophical and spiritual views could be seen in some of his statements. Once he said, “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” “An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature's answer.” In his famous lecture “Religion and Science” in May 1937, Planck wrote: “Both religion and science need for their activities the belief in God, and moreover God stands for the former in the beginning, and for the latter at the end of the whole thinking. For the former, God represents the basis, for the latter, the crown of any reasoning concerning the world-view.”
This book some has some rare pictures of him and his family, and I liked the one with his siblings. This biography illustrates the story of a brilliant man living in a dangerous time gives Max Planck his rightful place in the history of science, and it shows how ravages of war deeply impacted his life and work.
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