Max Planck was warned physics was nearly finished, then founded quantum theory
When young Max Planck chose theoretical physics, his Munich professor tried to talk him out of it: the science, he said, was all but complete. Planck ignored the advice, and his discovery that energy comes in tiny packets, or quanta, overturned the settled picture and won him the 1918 Nobel Prize.
Planck was born in Kiel on 23 April 1858 into a family of scholars; his great-grandfather and grandfather taught theology at Gottingen and his father taught law. Baptised with Marx among his names, he was signing himself Max by the age of ten. One of his earliest memories was Prussian and Austrian troops marching into Kiel in 1864. After the family moved to Munich, a mathematics teacher introduced him to the conservation of energy, and he finished school early, at 17.
He was also a gifted musician with perfect pitch who took singing lessons, played cello, organ and piano, and wrote operas as well as songs. At university in Munich he carried out the only experiments of his career, on hydrogen seeping through hot platinum, before turning to theory. A year in Berlin left him unimpressed by the lecturing of Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Kirchhoff, but reading Rudolf Clausius on heat convinced him to devote himself to thermodynamics.
His 1879 doctoral thesis tidied up Clausius's statement of the second law and extended it to every natural process. For Planck, entropy measured how irreversible a process was, and maximum entropy marked equilibrium. Working largely alone as an unpaid lecturer, he rediscovered much of what Josiah Willard Gibbs in America had already published, unaware of it. He also helped lay foundations for the theory of dissolved salts and explained why solutions freeze and boil at shifted temperatures.
In 1889 Berlin made him Kirchhoff's successor, and in 1907 he turned down Ludwig Boltzmann's old chair in Vienna to stay. Admirers called him a flawless lecturer who never used notes; the rooms were so stuffy that listeners sometimes fainted, and he kept talking. He retired in 1926, handing his chair to Erwin Schrodinger, and died on 4 October 1947. The research society he twice led was renamed the Max Planck Society the following year.
Source: Max Planck
