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Max
Planck came from an academic family.
His father was a professor of law at
Kiel
. His grandfather and
great – grandfather were also professors of theology at
Gottengen. When he was
16, max discussed the prospects of physics with Phillip Von Jolly,
the professor of physics at the
University
of
Munich
. Phillip told him
that physics was essentially a complete science with little
prospect of further developments.
Having been told this, he still decided to study physics
despite the bleak future for research that was presented to him.
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.”
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 thermoelectricity
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's
work on the quantum theory, as it came to be known, was published
in the Annalen der Physik. His work is summarized in two
books Thermodynamik (Thermodynamics) (1897) and Theorie
der Wärmestrahlung (Theory of heat radiation) (1906).
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 3, 1947
.
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