#MaxPlanckNobel100
2018 is centenary year of Max Planck's Nobel prize in physics
Albert Einstein
writing to Mrs. Planck after Planck’s death :
“Now your husband
has finished his days after he achieved greatness and experienced much
bitterness. His gaze was fixed on the eternal things, and yet he took an active
part in all that was human and he lived in the temporal sphere. How different
and better the human world would be if there were more such unique people among
the leaders. So it seems not to be, as the noble characters in every time and
every place must remain isolated without being able to influence the events
around them.
The hours that I
spent in your home, and the many conversations that I conducted in private with
the wonderful man will for the rest of my life belong to my beautiful memories.
It cannot change the fact that a tragic event tore us apart.
In today’s
loneliness, may you find comfort in that you have brought sun and harmony into
the life of this revered man. From a distance, I share with you the pain of
parting."
Brandon R. Brown, 'Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War', 2015:
"...Planck was born into an 1858 that employed candlelight and
horse-drawn carriages, but he came to hear radio-transmitted symphonies and
watch airplanes crisscross the sky. He joined a physics in the nineteenth
century that was reportedly nearing completion. There was as yet no Planck’s
constant to stand between a scientist and the pursuit of exact knowledge. The
atom was unlikely, light a pure wave, and energy indivisible. Time and space stood
absolute and inflexible before our rulers and clocks. Physics was a far flung
outpost of science then, with a tiny clan. Germans jokingly confused it with
forestry. But as Max Planck reached his last years, physicists stood like
shamans for a nuclear age. Their ideas flashed and echoed around the globe..."
Max Planck:
"Anyone who has
seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realises that over the
entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words, ‘Ye must
have faith'."
courtesy: Wikimedia
Manjit Kumar, 'Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality', 2007:
"...The photograph of those gathered at the fifth Solvay
conference on ‘Electrons and Photons’, held in Brussels from 24 to 29 October
1927, encapsulates the story of the most dramatic period in the history of
physics. With seventeen of the 29 invited eventually earning a Nobel Prize, the
conference was one of the most spectacular meetings of minds ever held. It
marked the end of a golden age of physics, an era of scientific creativity
unparalleled since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century led by
Galileo and Newton.
Paul Ehrenfest is standing, slightly hunched forward, in the
back row, third from the left. There are nine seated in the front row. Eight
men and one woman; six have Nobel Prizes in either physics or chemistry. The
woman has two, one for physics awarded in 1903 and another for chemistry in
1911. Her name: Marie Curie. In the centre, the place of honour, sits another
Nobel laureate, the most celebrated scientist since the age of Newton: Albert
Einstein. Looking straight ahead, gripping the chair with his right hand, he
seems ill at ease. Is it the winged collar and tie that are causing him
discomfort, or what he has heard during the preceding week? At the end of the
second row, on the right, is Niels Bohr, looking relaxed with a half-whimsical
smile. It had been a good conference for him. Nevertheless, Bohr would be
returning to Denmark disappointed that he had failed to convince Einstein to
adopt his ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of what quantum mechanics revealed about
the nature of reality.
Instead of yielding, Einstein had spent the week attempting
to show that quantum mechanics was inconsistent, that Bohr’s Copenhagen
interpretation was flawed. Einstein said years later that ‘this theory reminds
me a little of the system of delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoic,
concocted of incoherent elements of thoughts’.
It was Max Planck, sitting on Marie Curie’s right, holding
his hat and cigar, who discovered the quantum. In 1900 he was forced to accept
that the energy of light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation could
only be emitted or absorbed by matter in bits, bundled up in various sizes.
‘quantum’ was the name Planck gave to an individual packet of energy, with
‘quanta’ being the plural. The quantum of energy was a radical break with the long-established
idea that energy was emitted or absorbed continuously, like water flowing from
a tap. In the everyday world of the macroscopic where the physics of Newton
ruled supreme, water could drip from a tap, but energy was not exchanged in
droplets of varying size. However, the atomic and subatomic level of reality
was the domain of the quantum..."
