Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck

Max Planck, best known for his formulation of the quantum theory, had a passionate interest in thermodynamics in the early part of his career. 

He was bom in Kiel, Germany, where his father was a distinguished law professor. His family had a long tradition of conservatism, idealism, and excellence in scholarship. 

As a youth, Planck had difficulty deciding between music and physics as a career, finally settling on physics. He acquired his interest in thermodynamics from studies with Hermann von Hehnholtz and Gustav Kirchhoff and from the writings of Rudolf Clausius. His doctoral dissertation at the University of Munich (1879) was on the second law. 

In 1897, Planck turned his papers on thermodynamics into a concise introductory textbook, Treatise on Thermodynamics. It went through at least seven editions and has been translated into English.  

A consequence of this point of view [held by others] was that the assumption of irreversibility for proving the Second Law of Thermodynamics 

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German physicist Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck is born on April 23 in Kiel, Holstein, Germany. 

Wax Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (1858-1947). German physicist. Planck received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 for his quantum theory. He also made significant contributions in thermodynamics and other areas of physics. 

German physicist Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, recipient of the 1918 Nobel Prize in physics, in recognition of the services he rendered to the advancement of Physics by his discovery of energy quanta. ... 

Figure 3.21 Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, who in 1900 proposed the quantum hypothesis that fully explains the physics of blackbody radiation. (Published with permission from the Deutsches Museum, Munich.)...

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, bom Apr. 23, 1858, in Kiel, Germany, died Oct. 4, 1947, in Gottingen, Germany. 

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (1858-1947) German physicist Berlin, Germany, t Louis Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie (1892-1987) French physicist Paris, France. 

FIGURE 9.14 Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (1858-1947). Planck s quantum theory, proposed in 1900, marks the beginning of modern science. Trained as a thermodynamicist, he based his theory on thermodynamic arguments. It is said that he had some misgivings about the truth of his own ideas until experimental evidence was found in support of them. The Kaiser Wilhelm Society was renamed the Max Planck Institute in his honor in 1930 and is still a major institution in Germany. He received the Nobel Prize in 1918. 

The first step to a better understanding of the universe came in 1900 when the German physicist Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (Figure 9.14) proposed a relatively simple equation to predict the intensities of blackbody radiation. There is some speculation that Planck came up with an equation that fit the data and then reasoned out a justification, rather than supposing a new idea and working it up to see what would happen. No matter. For our purposes, all that is important is that he was correct. 

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