James Baquet

    Though not the household name that Einstetin, Bohr, Heisenberg, and other physicists ultimately became, the German theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) was as important as any of them, and in some ways surpassed the significance of most.

    It was Planck, working in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 for originating quantum theory, the model on which all modern physics rests today. He was also among the first to recognize the importance of Einstein’s special theory of relativity (published in 1905), which laid out the most widely accepted concept of the relationship between space and time.

    Planck was well-schooled in science, and was also something of a musical prodigy. When he chose physics over music, a teacher warned him that in physics, “almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few holes.” Planck replied that he wasn’t as interested in making discoveries as in understanding the world we lived in.

    Planck was the sixth child born to his father (and the fourth to his mother, his father’s second wife). His father was a lawyer, and his grandfather and great-grandfather theology professors, so he grew up in an intellectual household.

    In the years leading up to the Second World War, he refused to renounce the ideas of Einstein — a Jew — and while he was never seriously affected, this led to accusations by other scientists, and the government even investigated his ancestry. A larger tragedy was that all four of the children from his first marriage died before he did, the last at the hands of the Nazi Gestapo for attempting to assassinate Hitler.

    Today, Planck’s name is associated with broader studies. In 1948, the former Kaiser Wilhelm Society was renamed the Max Planck Society, which “supports fundamental research in the natural, life and social sciences, the arts and humanities” in its 83 institutes. Nobel-winning members have included Konrad Lorenz, Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, and Planck himself.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. refuse to recognize someone or something

    2. finally, in the end

    3. one’s family history

    4. starting, founding

    5. more inclusive

    6. thoroughly educated in

    7. respected, honored

    8. complaints that someone has done something wrong

    9. secret police of the Nazi era

    10. person known to ordinary people