Reference
- Planck, Max Karl Ernst Ludwig (1858-1947)German physicist who discovered that energy consists of fundamental indivisible units, which he called quanta. This discovery, made in 1900, marked the foundation of the quantum theory that revolutionized physics in the early 1900s. For this achievement, Planck gained the 1918 Nobel Prize for Physics.
Planck was born in Kiel on 23 April 1858. In 1867, his family moved to Munich, where Planck studied at the Maximilian Gymnasium before entering the University of Munich in 1874. Planck studied mathematics and physics, spending some time 1877-78 with Gustav Kirchhoff and Hermann von Helmholtz at the University of Berlin. Planck gained his PhD at Munich with a dissertation on thermodynamics in 1879 and became a lecturer there in the following year. In 1885, he was appointed extraordinary professor of physics at Kiel and then in 1888 moved to Berlin, where he became assistant professor of physics and director of the newly founded Institute for Theoretical Physics. Planck rose to become professor of physics at Berlin in 1892, a position he retained until 1926. In 1930, he was appointed president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute but resigned in 1937 in protest at the Nazis' treatment of Jewish scientists. In 1945, the institute was renamed the Max Planck Institute and moved to Göttingen. Planck was reappointed its president, a position he retained until he died in Göttingen on 4 October 1947.
In 1862, Kirchhoff had introduced the idea of a perfect black body that would absorb and emit radiation at all frequencies, reaching an equilibrium that depended on temperature and not the nature of the surface of the body. A series of investigations were then undertaken into the nature of the thermal radiation emitted by black bodies following the discovery by Josef Stefan in 1879 that the total energy emitted is proportional to the fourth power of the absolute temperature. Measurements of the frequency distribution of black-body radiation by Wilhelm Wien (1864-1928) in 1893 produced the result that the distribution is a function of the frequency and the temperature. A plot of the energy of the radiation against the frequency resulted in a series of curves at different temperatures, the peak value of energy occurring at a higher frequency with greater temperature. This may be observed in the varying colour produced by a glowing object. At low temperatures, it glows red but as the temperature rises the peak energy is emitted at a greater frequency, and the colour become yellow and then white...
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Perspectives
The Dilemmas of an Upright Man
In this moving and eloquent portrait, Heilbron describes how the founder of quantum theory rose to the pinnacle of German science. He shows how Planck suffered morally and intellectually as his lifelong habit of service to his country and to physics was confronted by the realities of World War I and the brutalities of the Third Reich.
Planck
Max Planck is credited with being the father of quantum theory, and his work was described by his close friend Albert Einstein as "the basis of all twentieth-century physics." But Planck's story is not well known, especially in the United States. A German physicist working during the first half of the twentieth century, his library, personal journals, notebooks, and letters were all destroyed with his home in World War II. What remains, other than his contributions to science, are handwritten letters in German shorthand, and tributes from other scientists of the time. In Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War, Brandon R. Brown interweaves the voices and writings of Planck, his family, and his contemporaries--with many passages appearing in English for the first time--to create a portrait of a groundbreaking physicist working in the midst of war. Planck spent much of his adult life grappling with the identity crisis of being an influential German with ideas that ran counter to his government. During the later part of his life, he survived bombings and battlefields, surgeries and blood transfusions, all the while performing his influential work amidst a violent and crumbling Nazi bureaucracy. When his son was accused of treason, Planck tried to use his standing as a German "national treasure," and wrote directly to Hitler to spare his son's life. Brown tells the story of Planck's friendship with the far more outspoken Albert Einstein, and shows how his work fits within the explosion of technology and science that occurred during his life. This story of a brilliant man living in a dangerous time gives Max Planck his rightful place in the history of science, and it shows how war-torn Germany deeply impacted his life and work.
Max Planck und Die Moderne Physik
Max Planck (1858-1947) zählt zu den herausragenden Physikern des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Seine Quantenhypothese wurde zur Grundlage für die Entwicklung der Quantentheorie und bildet eine der zentralen Säulen der modernen Physik. Damit ist Plancks Wirken jedoch keineswegs erschöpfend charakterisiert: In diesem Buch arbeiten anerkannte Physikhistoriker das gesamte Spektrum von Plancks physikalischem Schaffen heraus und würdigen seine Bedeutung für die Entwicklung der modernen Physik.
Max Planck
Max Planck is one of the most well-known physicists of all time! This interesting biography highlights his incredible life and what he did to make strides in the field of physics. Readers will learn about thermodynamics, entropy, and quantum theory through a variety of vivid images, fascinating facts, and easy-to-read text. Other important physicists are featured as well, including Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, Stephen Hawking, and Sally Ride. To aid in further engagement and better understanding of the content, a glossary and index are provided, as well as a hands-on lab activity!
Quantum Mechanics
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Delve into the paradoxical subject of quantum mechanics, which was pioneered by scientists probing atomic structure in the early 20th century. Learn about Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger. Focus on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the strange behavior of the Schrodinger wave function.
Introducing the Quantum
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowBegin your study of the ideas that revolutionized physics at the atomic scale: quantum theory. The word quantum comes from Max Planck's proposal in 1900 that the atomic vibrations that produce light must be quantized: that is, they occur only with certain discrete energies.
Two Revolutionaries - Planck and Einstein
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowAt the beginning of the 20th century, Max Planck and Albert Einstein proposed revolutionary ideas to resolve puzzles about light and matter. You explore Planck's discovery that light energy can only be emitted or absorbed in discrete amounts called quanta, and Einstein's application of this concept to matter.
Online Resources
- Measurement contextuality and Planck's constantContextuality is a necessary resource for universal quantum computation and non-contextual quantum mechanics can be simulated efficiently by classical computers in many cases. Orders of Planck's constant, , can also be used to characterize the classical-quantum divide by expanding quantities of interest in powers of -all orders higher than 0 can be interpreted as quantum corrections to the order 0 term. We show that contextual measurements in finite-dimensional systems have formulations within the Wigner-Weyl-Moyal (WWM) formalism that require higher than order 0 terms to be included in order to violate the classical bounds on their expectation values. As a result, we show that contextuality as a resource is closely related to orders of as a resource within the WWM formalism. This offers an explanation for why qubits can only exhibit state-independent contextuality under Pauli observables as in the Peres-Mermin square while odd-dimensional qudits can also exhibit state-dependent contextuality. In particular, qubit states exhibit contextuality when measured by qubit Pauli observables regardless of the state being measured and so the Weyl symbol of these observables lack an order 0 contribution altogether. On the other hand, odd-dimensional qudit states exhibit contextuality when measured by qudit observables depending on the state measured and so odd-dimensional qudit observables generally possess non-zero order 0 terms, and higher, in their WWM formulation: odd-dimensional qudit states that exhibit measurement contextuality have an order 1 contribution in their expectation values with the observable that allows for the violation of classical bounds while states that have insufficiently large order 1 contributions do not exhibit measurement contextuality.
- Position dependent Planck's constant in a frequency-conserving Schrödinger equationThere is controversial evidence that Planck’s constant shows unexpected variations with altitude above the earth due to Kentosh and Mohageg, and yearly systematic changes with the orbit of the earth about the sun due to Hutchin. Many others have postulated that the fundamental constants of nature are not constant, either in locally flat reference frames, or on larger scales. This work is a mathematical study examining the impact of a position dependent Planck’s constant in the Schrödinger equation. With no modifications to the equation, the Hamiltonian becomes a non-Hermitian radial frequency operator. The frequency operator does not conserve normalization, time evolution is no longer unitary, and frequency eigenvalues can be complex...
The Nature of Light and Matter
- Kanopy This link opens in a new windowTrace a scientific revolution that started with a curious observation about light and a seemingly nonsensical explanation. Learn how Max Planck's proposal that energy is related to frequency, and Albert Einstein's application of this principle to light, gave birth to modern physics.