MAX PLANCK

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was a German theoretical physicist

whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in
1918.
Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as
a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of quantum theory,
which revolutionized human understanding of atomic and subatomic
processes. In 1948, the German scientific institution the Kaiser Wilhelm
Society (of which Planck was twice president) was renamed the Max
Planck Society (MPS). The MPS now includes 83 institutions
representing a wide range of scientific directions.
Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family. His paternal great-
grandfather and grandfather were both theology professors in Göttingen;
his father was a law professor at the University of Kiel and Munich. One
of his uncles was also a judge.
Planck was born in Kiel, Holstein, to 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 (a now obsolete
variant of Markus or maybe simply an error for Max, which is actually
short for Maximilian) 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.
He was the 6th 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, and Planck enrolled in the
Maximilians gymnasium school, where he came under the tutelage of
Hermann Muller, 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 principle of conservation of
energy. Planck graduated early, at age 17.This is how Planck first came
in contact with the field of physics.
Planck was gifted when it came to music. He took singing lessons and
played piano, organ and cello, and composed songs and operas.
However, instead of music he chose to study physics.
The Munich physics professor Philipp von Jolly advised Planck against
going into physics, saying, "in this field, almost everything is already
discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes. "Planck replied that
he did not wish to discover new things, but only to understand the known
fundamentals of the field, and so began his studies in 1874 at the
University of Munich. Under Jolly's supervision, Planck performed the
only experiments of his scientific career, studying the diffusion of
hydrogen through heated platinum, but transferred to theoretical physics.
In 1877 he went to the Friedrich Wilhelms University in 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.

QUOTES
 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.
 We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they
have existed up until now, that they will continue to exist in a
similar manner in the future.
 Scientific discovery and scientific knowledge have been achieved
only by those who have gone in pursuit of it without any practical
purpose whatsoever in view.
 It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the
seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to
him.
 Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable
question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to
it.
BY
SNEHA SURESH