Talk:Max Planck

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[edit] Comments

<The last paragraph under "Nazi dictatorship and Second World War" should be removed or integrated in. It pretty much just repeats the previous few paragraphs or something but not even as a good summary. 98.6.133.100 03:46, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Please fix the picture formating for this page!

There is a better picture on the German Wikipedia. Perhaps I should replace the current one with it? (I'll probably get to it in a day or two, unless someone objects.) novakyu 10:24, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

"After several happy years the Planck family was struck by a series of disasters: in October 1909 Marie Planck died, possibly from tuberculosis. In March 1911 Max Planck married his second wife, Marga von Hoesslin (1882-1948); in December his third son, Herrmann, was born." Wtf? --83.147.171.12 10:14, 14 June 2006 (UTC)


Very interesting:Einstein and Planck are both considered the fathers of quantum physics, and, yet, the name "Einstein" is now worldwide consdiered synonymous to genius, texts on his life scrolls down to 15 pages, his biographies can be used as door stoppers everywhere, and discussion about him exceeds the limit on wikipedia; while Planck is left cold. Two lines argue over his picture and his entry is not shorter than Schroedinger. I don't get it. They are both Germans.

Max Planck was a genius and is covered in most universities' second year of physics study. Every prominent or budding physicist knows the name, and one could say that his theories will live forver, disproven or not. Your point is a valid one but the man maketh the name and not the other way around. (How many Schroedinger particles or measurements are you aware of, aswell?)

I think the difference is that Planck wasn't trying to rock the boat. In fact, his quantization to caluclate the black-body radiation was just considered a mathematical trick to make the problem tractable rather than something fundamental about the nature of light. In contrast, Einstein did rock the boat by saying that in order to explain the photoelectric effect light needed to be quantized.
Although both Planck and Einstein made many important discoveries that furthered quantum mechanics, Einstein was the one who actually made the conceptual leap out onto a limb by saying that quantization wasn't a simplifying mathematical trick, but that light was actually a particle. In other words, Planck is rather an accidental father of quantum mechanics, compared to Einstein who was the visionary one who spurred the creation of quantum mechanics (despite his distaste for it) and created a whole new field of physics (general relativity). That's why Einstein is widely called a genius and Planck is not. --Laura Scudder | Talk 16:30, 24 May 2005 (UTC)


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Hi, I just wrote an improved article about Planck for the German Wikipedia, and it might surely be useful for extending this article (and correcting various incorrect details), but therefore I need to translate it first which will take time (pls have a look yourself) Nullstein 03:15, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

I translated a few sections of his biography, but did it rather literally without an eye for beautiful English. I might come back later and work moving a few other sections on his work over, because that's rather underrepresented here. I haven't played with the old text at all but just left it as sort of an intro, so it may repeat stuff. Not sure what the incorrect details are that you reference. --Laura Scudder | Talk 17:46, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] I heard that this guy discovered some stuff that went against the 2nd law of thermodynamics

Is that true?

Definitely not. The only way known to me to suspend the 2nd law would be to reverse the direction of time - but this has not been achieved so far. Nullstein 4-VIII 2005
I believe that he actually violated the 2nd law of thermodynamics but was fined $20,000 by the international secret conspiracy of physicists-mechanists. I've heard so from a friend of mine, who had a friend that had a mother, that had a brother in law ... Said: Rursus 08:25, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Month Confirmation

"In April/May of 1946, Planck was succeded as president of the KWG by Otto Hahn."

Can someone confirm in which month Planck was succeded as president in? The original text stated that Planck was president till April, but it did not say whether his successor took the title of president in the same month, of one month later. Cosmos 03:18, September 2, 2005 (UTC)

It seems to be April 1st, 1946. Nullstein 8-IX 2005

[edit] Black Body Radiation section

The section about black body radiation is far better than the pages on this site that are supposed to be specifically about the topic. How about creating a sub-section either on the black body or ultraviolet catastrophe pages with some of the info from this one? - Drrngrvy 01:15, 5 December 2005 (UTC)


David Darling, in 'Teleportation - The Impossible Leap' claims that:

One of the myths of physics [...] is that Planck’s blackbody formula had something to do with what’s called the “ultraviolet catastrophe.” It didn’t. [...] In June 1900, the eminent English physicist Lord Rayleigh pointed out that if you assume something known as the equipartition of energy, which has to do with how energy is distributed among a bunch of molecules, then classical mechanics blows up in the face of blackbody radiation. The amount of energy a blackbody emits just shoots off the scale at the high-frequency end—utterly in conflict with the experimental data. Five years later, Rayleigh and his fellow countryman James Jeans came up with a formula, afterward known as the Rayleigh-Jeans law, that shows exactly how blackbody energy is tied to frequency if you buy into the equipartition of energy. The name “ultraviolet catastrophe,” inspired by the hopelessly wrong prediction at high frequencies, wasn’t coined until 1911 by the Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest. None of this had any bearing on Planck’s blackbody work; Planck hadn’t heard of Rayleigh’s June 1900 comments when he came up with his new blackbody formula in October. In any case, it wouldn’t have mattered: Planck didn’t accept the equipartition theorem as fundamental. So the ultraviolet catastrophe, which sounds very dramatic and as if it were a turning point in physics, doesn’t really play a part in the revolution that Planck ignited.

So what really happened?

--Sunnym4 22:26, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

The best source on this (that I know of) is Thomas Kuhn's book Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity. Planck basically built on the statistical thermodynamics approach of Ludwig Boltzmann to explain black-body radiation; the quantization aspect was more of a mathematical artifact than (in Planck's view at the time) than an intended theoretical/epistemological statement about the nature of energy. The ultraviolet catastrophe was indeed not one of Planck's concerns.--ragesoss 00:54, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

So, the current text is misleading as it states:

In 1894 Planck turned his attention to the problem of black-body radiation. [...] The question had been explored experimentally, but the Rayleigh-Jeans law, derived from classical physics, failed to explain the observed behaviour at high frequencies, where it predicted an unphysical divergence of the energy density towards infinity (the ultraviolet catastrophe).

This suggests the Rayleigh-Jeans law and 'ultraviolet catastroph' were known to Planck at the time - counter to what Kuhn says

--62.219.233.199 10:33, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

Exactly. I've tried to fix some of that. --24.147.86.187 12:28, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] The sound of one stream merging?

The text says:

Thanks to his initiative the society merged in 1898

Merged with what? The earlier context of this remark suggests that Planck was not at home in the existing society. Then it says that this society "merged," and finally it describes Planck becoming the leader of the "merged" society. I don't know the history, so I don't know whether the original society merged with another, competing, society, or whether the society split to form one group that went its original way and one society that was more congenial to Planck.

Whatever actually happened, the text cannot be permitted to remain as it is unless we add a "One hand clapping" category. ;-) P0M 20:47, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

Before 1898 there was no "German Physical Society", but only a number of separate local societies, each limited to one city or university or possibly one political sub-unit of the German Empire. It were these societies who merged into a nation-wide society. Nullstein 15:15, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] h = 0 ... in what contest? E=hv?

The text has:

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.

The situations in which Raleigh et alia were setting h = 0 is not stated. The only use of h in a physics formula that the reader of this article may know is E=hv. If h = 0... P0M 20:59, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

You are right: h=0 in E=hv is exactly what a "classical physicist" would do. Then E=0, so there is no quantisation of energy. Since h was introduced as a new fundamental constant of Nature, setting it zero would not refer to a particular situation only, but to the whole foundation of physics.
I know that the article presents the details of this discussion in a highly simplified way, but this is only an article about Planck's life. A detailed presentation could go into some other more specialised article. Nullstein 15:15, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Text Dump

I am reverting the following text-dump, which removed the header on "Education" and placed a discussion of his research and the date of his death, inter alia, under "Childhood and Youth" where it clearly does not belong. I paste the reverted text here so we can recover anything useful.

begin text dump---=

He was elected to Foreign Membership of the Royal Society in 1926, being awarded the Society's Copley Medal in 1928.

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 was revered by his colleagues not only for the importance of his discoveries but for his great personal qualities. He was also a gifted pianist and is said to have at one time considered music as a career.

Planck was twice married. Upon his appointment, in 1885, to Associate Professor in his native town Kiel he married a friend of his childhood, Marie Merck, who died in 1909. He remarried her cousin Marga von Hösslin. Three of his children died young, leaving him with two sons.

He suffered a personal tragedy when one of them was executed for his part in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944.

He died at Göttingen on October 4, 1947.

From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1901-1921, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1967

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

For more updated biographical information, see: Planck, Max, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers. Philosophical Library, New York, 1949.

I re-added a chunk from the above dump. --Sadi Carnot 19:46, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cultural depictions of Max Planck

I've started an approach that may apply to Wikipedia's Core Biography articles: creating a branching list page based on in popular culture information. I started that last year while I raised Joan of Arc to featured article when I created Cultural depictions of Joan of Arc, which has become a featured list. Recently I also created Cultural depictions of Alexander the Great out of material that had been deleted from the biography article. Since cultural references sometimes get deleted without discussion, I'd like to suggest this approach as a model for the editors here. Regards, Durova 15:50, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] copyright violation

the part "thermodynamics" was copied from http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1918/planck-bio.html i tried to delete it, but it came back

[edit] Pronunciation of "Max Planck"

What is the correct way to pronounce "Max Planck"? "Max" as in the english "maximum" or as in someone who "mucks" around with things? "Planck" as in "plank" of wood or "plunk" goes the stone as it drops onto the water? Patiwat 20:58, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

The a in both names sounds like an ah rather like in "spa" (an open back unrounded vowel). Neither the normal English a or u sounds come anywhere close, putting the tongue way too far forward. — Laura Scudder ☎ 21:11, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
I would pronounce it exactly as "mucks plunk". Says a native German. --129.70.14.128 (talk) 18:05, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Religious view added

I believe I have an almost identical religious view to the one of Max Planck, so the section I wrote contains my interpretations, that I've tried to neutralize as much as possible, by adding "may" and other speculation indicators. Feel free to scrutinize and improve! Said: Rursus 08:21, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hermann Müller

Could someone fill in on when he lived, what family enviroment, how he got into physics, schools, achievements? I noted that the german version doesn't mention him at all. Electron9 20:19, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Academic Advisor

I think von Jolly were'nt Planck's advisor. According Mathematics Genealogy Project advisor was Alexander von Brill213.186.252.107 (talk) 08:32, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

213.186.252.107 (talk) has replaced Philipp von Jolly with Alexander von Brill. Jolly is probably wrong (seemingly he taught MP for one year only); is there a reference for von Brill, please?--Old Moonraker (talk) 14:29, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
As I said info is from Mathematics Genalogy Project: Max Planck213.186.255.121 (talk) 10:59, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for giving us the link. --Old Moonraker (talk) 14:18, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Revisionistic

I just removed the text: "[what does this mean? If the author makes subjective statements such as these, they should at least be explained. Stresemann worked to change the Versailles peace treaty, and this is not a negative position, as implied here. The Versailles structure is now accepted as having been severely flawed in conception and implementation, helping to propel the National Socialists to power]" from the article. It appeared just after the word "revisionistic". --Oz1sej (talk) 12:14, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


[edit] Real name "Marx Planck"

Recent surprise discoveries in an official document from 1858 of the church library/archive in Kiel suggest that Max Planck was really baptised "Marx Planck" (Marx from the latin Marcus). This might have significant consequences e.g. for his biography and the Max Planck Society. Couldn't yet find an English source for this developing story. Here is one in German from the news magazine Der Spiegel http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,549404,00.html Norsktroll (talk) 14:09, 24 April 2008 (UTC)