In existographies, Max Planck (1858-1947) (IQ:190|#42) [RGM:18|1,500+] (Gottlieb 1000:25) (Odueny 100:15) [Kanowitz 50:8] [Cropper 30:1|QM] (GPE:17) [CR:247] was a German physicist and thermodynamicist, noted for []“One day, I happened to come across the treatises of Rudolf Clausius, whose lucid style and enlightening clarity of reasoning made an enormous impression on me, and I became deeply absorbed in his articles, with an ever increasing enthusiasm. I appreciated especially his exact formulation of the two laws of thermodynamics, and the sharp distinction which he was the first to establish between them.”
“Up to that time, as a consequence of the theory that heat is a substance, the universally accepted view had been that the passing of heat from a higher to a lower temperature was analogous to the sinking of a weight from a higher to a lower position, and it was not easy to overcome this mistaken opinion.”
“Heat will not pass spontaneously from a colder to a hotter body. This means not only that heat will not pass directly from a colder into a warmer body, but also that it is impossible to transmit, by any means, heat from a colder into a hotter body without there remaining in nature some change to serve as compensation.”
“The process of heat conduction cannot be completely reversed by any means. This expresses the same idea as the wording of Clausius, but without requiring an additional clarifying explanation. A process which in no manner can be completely reversed I called a ‘natural’ one. The term for it in universal use today, is: ‘Irreversible’.”
“Since the question whether a process is reversible or irreversible depends solely on the nature of the initial state and of the terminal state of the process, but not on the manner in which the process develops, in the case of an irreversible process the terminal state is in a certain sense more important than the initial state—as if, so to speak, nature ‘preferred’ it to the latter. I saw a measure of this ‘preference’ in Clausius' entropy; and I found the meaning of the second law of thermodynamics in the principle that in every natural process the sum of the entropies of all bodies involved in the process increases.”
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| An earlier photo of Planck. | ||
“In those days I was essentially the only theoretical physicist there, whence things were not so easy for me, because I started mentioning entropy, but this was not quite fashionable, since it was regarded as a mathematical spook.”
“Thermochemistry treats of the relationships between chemical and thermal phenomena, and together with photochemistry and electrochemistry constitutes the field of physical chemistry.”
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| A Helmholtz vs Gibbs (as lecturer) comparison, the former of which Planck attended, as commented on above (left). (Ѻ) |
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”— Max Planck (1949), Scientific Autobiography (pgs. 33-34)
“Natural science wants men to learn. Religion wants them to act.”
“The law of causation is the guiding rule of science; but the categorical imperative—that is to say, the dictate of duty—is the guiding rule of life. Here intelligence has to give way to character, and scientific knowledge to religious belief. And when I say religious belief here I mean the word in its fundamental sense.”
“Isaac Newton (b.1642), Max Planck (b.1858), Copernicus (b.1473), Galileo (b.1564), Francis Bacon (b.1561), and Pascal (b.1623) all believed in God. What they also all have in common is that none of them was born within a 150-years of us. Today, 3 out of every 5 scientists (60 percent) say, knowing what they know, they can’t really buy into the concept of god.”
“[I do not believe] in a personal god, let alone a Christian god.”— Max Planck (1947), “Comment to W.H. Kick”, Jun 18; four months before his dereaction (Oct 4) [10]
“The work of Planck is the basis of all twentieth-century physics.”— Albert Einstein (c.1930) [10]
“As a student, he chose a certain branch of this science, for which even its neighbor sciences had but little regard—and even within this particular branch a highly-specialized field, in which literally nobody at all had any interest whatever. His first scientific papers were not read even by Helmholtz, Kirchhoff and Clausius, the very men who would have found it easiest to appreciate them. Yet, he continued on his way, obeying an inner call, until he came face to face with a problem which many others before him had tried and failed to solve, a problem for which the very path taken by him turned out to have been the best preparation. Thus, he was able to recognize and to formulate, from measurements of radiations, the law which bears and immortalizes his name for all times. He announced it before the Berlin Physical Society on Oct 19, 1900. On Dec 14 1900, again before the German Physical Society, he was able to present the theoretical deduction of the law of radiation. This was the birthday of quantum theory.”— Max von Laue (1948), “Memorial Address” [12]
“The advantage of the principle of least action is that in one and the same equation it relates the quantities that are immediately relevant not only to mechanics but also to electrodynamics and thermodynamics; these are space, time, and potential.”— Max Planck (date), Publication [8]
“In physics, as in every other science, common sense alone is not supreme; there must also be a place for reason. Further, the mere absence of logical contradiction does no necessarily imply that everything is reasonable. Now reason tells that if we turn our back upon a so-called object and cease to attend to it, the object still continues to exist. Reason tells us further that both the individual and mankind as a whole, together with the entire world which we apprehend through our senses, is no more than a tiny fragment of the vastness of nature, whose laws are in no way affected by any brain. On the contrary, they existed long before there was any life on earth, and will continue to exist long after the last physicist has perished.”
— Max Planck (1931), The Universe in the Light of Modern Science [7]“Of course, it took a number of years before the physicist community paid attention to my theory. Because at the beginning, it was not understood in wide circles, and as a result was ignored, as it so often goes with such newer things.”— Max Planck (1942), Film Archive of Personalities (Ѻ), referring to his quantum theory
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| Planck studying at his desk. |
“If a historian wanted to ascribe the decision of Julius Caesar to cross the Rubicon not to his political deliberations and to his innate temperament, but to his free will, his view would be tantamount to a renunciation of scientific understanding. Therefore, we will have to conclude that from the external view point of observation the will is to be assume as causally determined.”— Max Planck (1946), “Phantom Problems in Science”, Jun 17 [13]
“My original decision to devote myself to science was a direct result of the discovery which has never ceased to fill me with enthusiasm since my early youth—the comprehension of the far from obvious fact that the laws of human reasoning coincide with the laws governing the sequences of the impressions we receive from the world about us; that, therefore, pure reasoning can enable man to gain an insight into the mechanism of the latter. In this connection, it is of paramount importance that 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.”— Max Planck (c.1947), Scientific Autobiography (pg. 13) [13]
“My studies of entropy, which I regarded as next to energy the most important property of physical systems. Since its maximum value indicates a state of equilibrium, all the laws of physical and chemical systems follow from a knowledge of entropy.”— Max Planck (c.1947), Scientific Autobiography (pgs. 19-20) [13]
