Max Planck

Biography of M. K. E. L. Planck
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born in Kiel, Germany, on April 23, 1858, the son of Julius Wilhelm and Emma (née Patzig) Planck. He was Privatdozent in Munich from 1880 to 1885, then Associate Professor of Theoretical Physics at Kiel until 1889, in which year he succeeded Kirchhoff as Professor at Berlin University, where he remained until his retirement in 1926. Afterwards he became President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Promotion of Science, a post he held until 1937.
Planck's earliest work was on the subject of thermodynamics, an interest he acquired from his studies under Kirchhoff, whom he greatly admired, and very considerably from reading R. Clausius' publications. He published papers on entropy, on thermoelectric ity and on the theory of dilute solutions.
At the same time also the problems of radiation processes engaged his attention and he showed that these were to be considered as electromagnetic in nature. From these studies he was led to the problem of the distribution of energy in the spectrum of full radiation. Experimental observations on the wavelength distribution of the energy emitted by a black body as a function of temperature were at variance with the predictions of classical physics. Planck was able to deduce the relationship between the ener gy and the frequency of radiation. In a paper published in 1900, he announced his derivation of the relationship: this was based on the revolutionary idea that the energy emitted by a resonator could only take on discrete values or quanta. The energy for a resonator of frequency v is hv where h is a universal constant, now called Planck's constant.
Planck faced a troubled and tragic period in his life during the period of the Nazi government in Germany, when he felt it his duty to remain in his country but was openly opposed to some of the Government's policies, particularly as regards the persecuti on of the Jews. In the last weeks of the war he suffered great hardship after his home was destroyed by bombing. He died at Göttingen on October 3, 1947.
http://www.nobel.se/laureates/physics-1918-1-bio.html

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck Winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics
1918 Nobel Laureate in Physics "in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta."
http://www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/physics/1918a.html

Max Planck - Nobel Prize Physics 1918
"in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta"
http://www.nobel.se/laureates/physics-1918.html

Max Planck
Max Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame rests primarily on his role as originator of the quantum theory. 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.
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 he introduced the wave-particle duality into physics.
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.
http://astro.estec.esa.nl/SA-general/Projects/Planck/mplanck/mplanck.html

Max Goes Online - Max Planck
Bei Lichte betrachtet müssen wir mit Fug und Recht als erstes Wunder die Tatsache verzeichnen, daß wir überhaupt in der Natur Gesetzmäßigkeiten vorfinden, die für die Menschen aller Länder, Völker und Rassen genau die gleichen sind. Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Wissenschaft, Vortrag gehalten im November 1942
http://www.karlsruhe.de/Schulen/Max-Planck-Gymnasium/planck/max.html

Max Planck
Max Planck was a German physicist who lived between 1858-1947. His theories changed our understanding of atomic processes and started the field of quantum physics, which studies energy inside atoms. Many of Planck's ideas were later used by Einstein when he developed his theory of relativity.
http://windows.ivv.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/tour_def/people/modern_era/planck.html

PLANCK, Max
(1858-1947). Awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1918, German physicist Max Planck is best remembered as the originator of the quantum theory (see Quantum Mechanics ). His work helped usher in a new era in theoretical physics and revolutionized the scientific community's understanding of atomic and subatomic processes.
http://www.optonline.com/comptons/ceo/03769_A.html

Max Planck
The German physicist Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, b. Apr. 23, 1858, d. Oct. 3, 1947, developed the concept of the quantum, or fundamental increment of energy--basic to quantum mechanics, and a cornerstone of modern physics. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1879, Planck taught at the University of Kiel (1885-89) and the University of Berlin (1889-1926). His appointment at the latter institution included the directorship of the Institute of Theoretical Physics that was newly founded for him.
http://sirius.phy.hr/~dpaar/fizicari/xplanck.html

Planck
By combining the formulas of Wien and Rayleigh, Planck announced in 1900 a formula now known as Planck's radiation formula. In a letter written a year later Planck described proposing the formula saying:-

... the whole procedure was an act of despair because a theoretical interpretation had to be found at any price, no matter how high that might be.

Within two months Planck made a complete theoretical deduction of his formula renouncing classical physics and introducing the quanta of energy. At first the theory met resistance but due to the successful work of Niels Bohr in 1913, calculating positions of spectral lines using the theory, it became generally accepted. Planck himself explains how despite having invented quantum theory he did not understand it himself at first:-

I tried immediately to weld the elementary quantum of action somehow in the framework of classical theory. But in the face of all such attempts this constant showed itself to be obdurate ... My futile attempts to put the elementary quantum of action into the classical theory continued for a number of years and they cost me a great deal of effort.

Planck received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918.
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Planck.html

Max Planck
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born on 23 April in Kiel Germany. In 1874 Planck entered the University of Munich. Planck was deeply impressed by the law of conservation of energy and he became convinced that the second law of termodynamics was an absolute law of nature. Planck based his doctoral dissertation on the second law of thermodynamics and in July 1879, at the young age of 21 he received his doctoral degree.
Planck was intrigued by the law discovered by his colleague Wilhelm Wien in 1896. He made several attempts at deriving this law, starting from the second law of thermodynamics as a base Experimental evidence was coming to light which showed that Wiens law broke down completely at low frequencies but was perfectly viable at high frequencies. Plank guessed that, since the entropy of radiation depended mathematically on it's energy in the high frequency range due to Wiens law, and that because he knew what the dependance was in the low frequency region, he should somehow combine these two properties in some simple manner resulting in a formula relating frequency, to the energy of radiation. The formula was hailed a great success, but Planck noted that it was just a formula; a lucky guess which still had to be derived from first principles in order to give it a proper scientific standing.
In 1900, at the age of 42, Planck achieved this, but in the process he had to abandon one of his greatest beliefs - that the second law of thermodynamics was an absolute law of nature. He was forced to accept Ludwig Boltzmann's statistical explanation for the second law. Planck also had to assume that the black body oscillators could only absorb and emit energy in discrete amounts of energy - packets of energy which he called quanta.
http://www.physics.gla.ac.uk/introPhy/Famous/planck/planck.html

Planck
Born: 23 April 1858 in Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
Died: 4 Oct 1947 in Göttingen, Germany
Max Planck initiated the study of quantum mechanics when he announced in 1900 his theoretical research into radiation and absorption of a black body.
Planck describes why he chose physics:-

The outside world is something independent from man, something absolute, and the quest for the laws which apply to this absolute appeared to me as the most sublime scientific pursuit in life.

http://www.vma.bme.hu/mathhist/Mathematicians/Planck.html

Planck, Max (1858-1947)
German physicist who formulated an equation describing the Blackbody spectrum in 1900. Wien and Rayleigh had also developed equations, but Wien's only worked at high frequencies, and Rayleigh's only worked at low frequencies. Planck's spectrum was obtained by postulating that energy was directly proportional to frequency (). Planck believed that this quantization applied only to the the absorption and emission of energy by matter, not to electromagnetic waves themselves. However, it turned out to be much more general than he could have imagined.
http://www.treasure-troves.com/bios/Planck.html

About Max Planck
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born on April 23, 1858 in Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein (Germany), as the sixth child of a professor of law at the university of Kiel.
While in Berlin Planck studied thermodynamics, in particular examining the distribution of energy according to wavelength. By combining the formulas of Wien and Rayleigh, Planck announced in 1900 a formula now known as Planck's »radiation formula« or »Planck's constant h«.
Within two months he made a complete theoretical deduction of his formula renouncing classical physics and introducing the »quanta of energy«.
At first his theory found strong resistance but due to the successful work of Niels Bohr in 1913, calculating positions of spectral lines using Planck's theory, it became generally accepted.
At the end of World War II, American officers took Planck and his wife to Göttingen, where he died on October 4, 1947, in his 89th year.
http://www.mpg.es.bw.schule.de/allgemein/maxplanck/max_plan.htm

Max Planck
The German physicist Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, b. Apr. 23, 1858, d. Oct. 3, 1947, developed the concept of the quantum, or fundamental increment of energy, basic to quantum mechanics, and a cornerstone of modern physics.
http://www.electro-optical.com/bb_rad/mplanck.htm

Max Planck
German physicist and Nobel laureate, who was the originator of the quantum theory. Planck was born in Kiel on April 23, 1858, and educated at the universities of Munich and Berlin. In 1900 Planck postulated that energy is radiated in small, discrete units, which he called quanta. Developing his quantum theory further, he discovered a universal constant of nature, which came to be known as Planck's constant. Planck's law states that the energy of each quantum is equal to the frequency of the radiation multiplied by the universal constant.
Planck received many honors for his work, notably the 1918 Nobel Prize in physics.
http://www.demogr.mpg.de/General/Member/MaxP.htm

Max Planck, "Revolutionär wider Willen"
Jürgen Langenbach - DER STANDARD, 13. Dezember 2000
Vor hundert Jahren wurden die Grundlagen der Quantenphysik gelegt
Vor hundert Jahren begann die seltsamste aller Revolutionen. Sie prägt zwar unser Alltagsleben rundum - kein Computer liefe ohne sie -, ist aber unserem Alltagsbewusstsein fremd geblieben. Und ihr Betreiber war kein hitzköpfiger Weltverbesserer, sondern ein "absolut unrevolutionärer Protoyp des preußischen Geheimrats", erklärt Anton Zeilinger (Experimentalphysik, Uni Wien) dem STANDARD: Max Planck, der "Revolutionär wider Willen".
http://derstandard.at/dyn/archiv/archarchiv.asp?artfn=/archiv/20001213/101.htm&strTitle=Max+Planck%2C+%22Revolution%E4r+wider+Willen%22

PLANCK'S CONSTANT
Fundamental physical constant, symbol h, first discovered (1900) by the German physicist Max Planck. Until that year, light in all forms had been thought to consist of waves.
http://www.fwkc.com/encyclopedia/low/articles/p/p020000016f.html

Planck's Constant and the Energy of a Photon
In 1900, Max Planck was working on the problem of how the radiation an object emits is related to its temperature. He came up with a formula that agreed very closely with experimental data, but the formula only made sense if he assumed that the energy of a vibrating molecule was quantized--that is, it could only take on certain values. The energy would have to be proportional to the frequency of vibration, and it seemed to come in little "chunks" of the frequency multiplied by a certain constant. This constant came to be known as Planck's constant, or h, and it has the value

http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/quantumzone/photoelectric2.html

Biography of Max Planck
Raul Barron
Max Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics and attained his fame via his role as originator of the quantum theory. This theory revolutionized our understanding of atomic and subatomic processes, it is one of the fundamental theories of 20th-century physics, and has led to industrial and military applications that affect every aspect of modern life.
http://wwwchem.csustan.edu/chem3070/Raul1.htm

ESVA: Planck Mini-Exhibit
"It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts." --Max Planck

In his Scientific Autobiography, Max Planck penned a now familiar adage known as Planck's Principle:

"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."
http://www.aip.org/history/esva/exhibits/planck.htm

A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: Planck discovers the quantum nature of energy
In 1899 Max Planck became a professor at the University of Berlin, after nine years at the University of Munich and Kiel University, in Germany. In his research there, he turned to a thermodynamic problem raised by one of his old teachers. The problem was that of a "black body," something that absorbs all frequencies (or wavelengths) of light. When heated it should then radiate all frequencies of light equally -- theoretically. But the distribution of energy radiated in "real life" never matched up with the predictions of classical physics.
Planck was as steeped in traditional physics as his colleagues, but he had an open mind. The older way wasn't working. So he changed one basic assumption: energy, instead of being continuous, comes in distinct particles. These were later called "quanta," from the Latin for "how much?" Though it sounded outlandish, applying this idea to the problem of heated bodies revealed a simple relationship that explained previous puzzles. Planck found that the energy radiated from a heated body is exactly proportional to the wavelength of its radiation. So, a black body would not radiate all frequencies equally. As temperature goes up, energy increases and it's more likely that quanta with higher energy will be radiated. So, as an object heats up, the light given off is orange, then yellow, and eventually bluish. The wavelength emitted is a function of the energy times a constant (h), now known as Planck's constant.
In 1905, Albert Einstein used the theory of quanta to accurately describe the photoelectric effect. In 1913, Niels Bohr incorporated Planck's idea into his revision of model of the atom, resolving inconsistencies that classical physics could not.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dp00qu.html

quantum theory
In physics, the theory that energy does not have a continuous range of values, but is, instead, absorbed or radiated discontinuously, in multiples of definite, indivisible units called quanta. Just as earlier theory showed how light, generally seen as a wave motion, could also in some ways be seen as composed of discrete particles (photons), quantum theory shows how atomic particles such as electrons may also be seen as having wavelike properties. Quantum theory is the basis of particle physics, modern theoretical chemistry, and the solid-state physics that describes the behaviour of the silicon chips used in computers.
The theory began with the work of Max Planck in 1900 on radiated energy, and was extended by Albert Einstein to electromagnetic radiation generally, including light. Danish physicist Niels Bohr used it to explain the spectrum of light emitted by excited hydrogen atoms. Later work by Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, and others elaborated the theory to what is called quantum mechanics (or wave mechanics).
http://ukdb.web.aol.com/hutchinson/encyclopedia/18/M0029018.htm

Encyclopædia Britannica: Max Planck
Planck's concept of energy quanta 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 Poincaré 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.
http://britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/5/0,5716,115045+2,00.html

Max Planck
Max Planck, allemand, est né le 23 avril 1858, à Kiel capitale du Schleswif-Holsteil. Il est le sixième enfant d'une vieille famille de la haute bourgoisie.
Pour expliquer la loi qui donne la valeur "E" de l'énergie rayonnée par un corps parfaitement absorbant (corps noir) en fonction de la température absolue "T" de ce corps, et de la longueur d'onde (lamda) de la radiation émise, Planck introduit cette idée révolutionnaire dans la physique de son temps, à savoir que l'énergie rayonnée par un corps noir est un multiple entier du nombre hf, "f" étant la fréquence émise et "h" la constante de Planck. Avec cette hypothèse, l'énergie "E" correspondant à une température "T" et à une longueur d'onde est donnée par la formule E=hf (E=hc/lamda).
Dans cette formule, "h" est la constante de Planck et "c" est la vistesse de la lumière (c=3 X10⁸ m/s). Elles sont des constantes bien connues.
http://mendeleiev.cyberscol.qc.ca/chimisterie/9606/CNadeau.html

Quotations by Planck
"If anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows he has not understood the first thing about them."
http://turnbull.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Quotations/Planck.html