Max Planck

Max Planck

On April 23, 1858 Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born in Kiel, Germany.

He was the sixth child of a law professor at the University of Kiel. At the age

of nine his interest in physics and mathematics was developed by his teacher

Hermann Muller. When he graduated at the age of seventeen he decided to choose

physics over music for his career. Although he is know for physics he was an

exceptional pianist who had acquired the gift of being able to hear absolute

pitch. His favorite works of music were known to be Schubert and Brahms.

Entering the University of Munich in 1874 he got little inspiration and was

unimpressed at the University of Berlin which was between the years of 1877 and

1878. He in turn did independent studies primarily on Rudolf Clausius' writings

of thermodynamics which inspired him and in July 1879 he received his doctoral

degree at the age of twenty-one. He became a lecturer at the University of

Munich. His father helped him be promoted to associate professor at Kiel by

means of professional connections. At the age of thirty he was promoted to full

professor at the University of Berlin.

After he decided to become a theoretical physicist he started a quest for

absolute laws. His favorite absolute law was the law of the conservation of

energy which was the first law of thermodynamics that stated that you could take

any equal amount of energy and transform it into the same equal amount of energy

ideally, meaning no energy was lost. The second law of thermodynamics led him

to discover the quantum of action or Planck's constant h. How he came upon his

formula for quantum mechanics well be explained as follows. Planck saw that

blackbody radiation acted in an absolute sense because it was defined by

Kirchhoff as a substance that could absorb almost all radiating energy and emit

all that it had absorbed perfectly which is associated with the first law of

thermodynamics. By using various experiments and theoretical failures many

scientists tried to find the spectral energy distribution to try and draw a

diagram of a curve that showed the amount of radiation given off at different

frequencies for a blackbody with a given temperature. Then using Wien's law

which worked out for high frequencies but didn't work for low, he saw a

relationship with the mathematics of the entropy of the radiation in the high-

frequency waves in correlation to the low frequency waves and he guessed if he

combined the two in the simplest way that he would get a formula that related to