Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (; German: [ˈmaks ˈplaŋk] ; 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist. He was awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the services he rendered to the advancement of physics by his discovery of energy quanta". Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, primarily in his role as the originator of quantum theory and one of the founders of modern physics, which revolutionized understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. He is known for the Planck constant, h {\displaystyle h} , which is of foundational importance for quantum physics, and which he used to derive a set of units, now called Planck units, expressed in terms of physical constants. The Planck relation, E= h {\displaystyle h} ν, states that the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency. Planck was twice President of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. In 1948 it was renamed the Max Planck Society, and today includes 83 institutions representing a wide range of scientific disciplines.
Early life and education Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born on 23 April 1858 in Kiel, the son of 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 was indicated as the "appellation name". However, by the age of ten he signed with the name Max and used this for the rest of his life. Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family. His paternal great-grandfather and grandfather were both theology professors at the University of Göttingen; his father was a law professor at Kiel University and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. One of his uncles was also a judge. Planck was the sixth 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. In 1867, the family moved to Munich, where Planck enrolled at Maximiliansgymnasium. There, his mathematical talents emerged early and he later 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 law of conservation of energy. This is how Planck first came in contact with the field of physics. Planck graduated early, at age 17. Planck was gifted in music; he took singing lessons and played piano, organ and cello, and composed songs and operas. Per Encyclopædia Britannica, "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." In 1874, Planck enrolled at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Under professor Philipp von Jolly's supervision, Planck performed the only experiments of his scientific career, studying the diffusion of hydrogen through heated platinum, but then transferred to theoretical physics. Jolly advised Planck against going into theoretical physics; 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". In 1877, Planck went to the Friedrich Wilhelm University of 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 a close friend with Helmholtz. While there he undertook a program of mostly self-study of Rudolf Clausius' writings, which led him to choose thermodynamics as his field.
In October 1878, Planck passed his qualifying exams and in February 1879 defended his thesis Über den zweiten Hauptsatz der mechanischen Wärmetheorie (On the second law of mechanical heat theory). 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. He then presented his habilitation thesis entitled Gleichgewichtszustände isotroper Körper in verschiedenen Temperaturen (Equilibrium states of isotropic bodies at different temperatures).
Career and research In 1880, Planck became a Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, 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' ideas on entropy occupied a central role in his work. In April 1885, Planck was appointed associate professor of Theoretical Physics at Kiel University. Further work on entropy and its treatment, especially as applied in physical chemistry, followed. He published his Treatise on Thermodynamics in 1897. He proposed a thermodynamic basis for Svante Arrhenius's theory of electrolytic dissociation. In 1889, Planck was named the successor to Kirchhoff's position at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin – presumably thanks to Helmholtz's intercession – and by 1892 became Full Professor. In 1907, he was offered Ludwig Boltzmann's position in Vienna, but turned it down to stay in Berlin. During 1909, as a professor at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, 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. He retired from Berlin on 10 January 1926, and was succeeded by Erwin Schrödinger.
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