What do you think?
Rate this book
Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science
In this moving and eloquent portrait, John Heilbron describes how the founder of quantum theory rose to the pinnacle of German science. With great understanding, he shows how Max 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.
In an afterword written for this edition, Heilbron weighs the recurring questions among historians and scientists about the costs to others, and to Planck himself, of the painful choices he faced in attempting to build an “ark” to carry science and scientists through the storms of Nazism.
In an afterword written for this edition, Heilbron weighs the recurring questions among historians and scientists about the costs to others, and to Planck himself, of the painful choices he faced in attempting to build an “ark” to carry science and scientists through the storms of Nazism.
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
3 people are currently reading
167 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 29, 2021
There were two famous German physicists who came under intense scrutiny because of their decisions not to leave Germany after Adolf Hitler seized power and put in place his hydra-headed programme of anti-semitism and particularly his persecution of German scientists who had any Jewish background. These two physicists, both Nobel Prize winners, were Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg. Neither Planck nor Heisenberg was a Nazi. But to make it clear that winning a Nobel Prize provided no guarantee of political acceptability, two other Nobel Prize winners, Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard, became rabid Nazis, were happy to do the bidding of those who ran the Third Reich, were virulent anti-semites, and were contemporaries of both Planck and Heisenberg. Good biographies exist of both Planck and Heisenberg. Heilbron’s book isn’t presented as a full biography, but attempts to look at Planck as a person and how as an administrator of scientific institutions he handled, or failed to handle, the changes imposed by Hitler and his henchmen and their impacts on Planck’s Jewish colleagues.
The title of the book is well chosen. Max Planck was at the forefront of those who formulated the new concepts that ushered in quantum physics and forced a reluctant rethink of views by some classical physicists. One might say that it was essentially Planck and Heisenberg who led the charge on this sea change, and that quantum physics was very much a product of the German-speaking world. This was one reason why Planck enjoyed such great esteem not only in Germany but throughout the international physics community. The other reason was that Planck was seen as truly a good, honest, and conscientious person. Hence the “upright” label.
In the book, Heilbron takes pains to discuss why Planck chose to remain in Germany when so many of his colleagues fled. And the number who fled were legion: Einstein, James Franck, Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch, Max Born, Richard Courant (a mathematician), and many more. As Heilbron puts it, the lush garden that was German physics abruptly turned into a desert. The famous German mathematician, David Hilbert, had much the same observation about how German mathematics was devastated by the same imposed changes. But Planck’s worldview was that German physics prospered for very specific reasons, and that it was a garden that needed careful tending. Planck saw himself as the gardener. So, when Hitler came to power, the problem Planck had to face was how to navigate through the mess that was Third Reich politics in order to maintain support and funding for German physics. Inevitably there were compromises, some of which were deemed by others to have been unacceptable. Hence the “dilemmas” label.
Taking a sympathetic view, both Planck and Heisenberg were faced by situations that offered unpleasant, even unpalatable choices. When viewed critically, the historical record of what these two men decided to do and why is ambiguous. Various people have chosen after the fact to judge the two men harshly; the judgments of others have been gentler. Heilbron’s judgment falls somewhere in between, definitely leaning toward a more generous conclusion, but not avoiding information that might be seen as damning. And without saying so explicitly, he indicates that given Planck’s personality and makeup, his expectation that what was worse in the Third Reich would not come to the worst but would improve, and his basic decision to remain in Germany, his situation was impossible. Before the fact, nobody could be confident of their own path if placed in Planck’s situation.
Heilbron ends the book in the following paragraph:
“And there is the dilemma of dilemmas. Few actions are mandated by categorical imperative. Moral behaviour is guided in practice by maxims derived from social experience and judged by its near and remote consequences. How and when should the reckoning be made? Did Planck take the best way with the Nazis by staying in office and preserving, as best he could, his clear conscience and good will? Did his worldview ennoble or betray him?”
At the end of an Afterword (dated 2000) to the book that takes into account information which emerged after the book’s first appearance in 1986, Heilbron writes as follows, beginning with a quote from Planck:
“ ’Whoever wants to know who I am I ask to read what I have written and printed.’ It is not enough. We must also know what he did in obedience to the things he wrote. What he did during the Nazi period was to act in accordance with a worldview that allowed him no escape from his situation with his honor intact. That was the saddest of his catastrophes. The answer to the question with which Dilemmas ends is that his worldview betrayed him.”
Max Planck died of a stroke on October 4 1947, at the age of 89. By that time he had suffered great personal tragedy. His eldest son Karl had died of wounds he received in battle. His two daughters both had died in childbirth. A granddaughter had died in an accident. His youngest son Erwin had been accused, probably falsely, of being complicit in the plot to assassinate Hitler. He had been cleared of that charge, but then Planck learned without warning that Erwin had been executed.
By then he was also destitute. In a fierce bombing raid on Berlin, a direct hit had been made on his house in the suburb of Grunewald. The house, along with all its contents, was destroyed completely. For a time Planck wandered homeless, and he spent some nights sleeping in haystacks.
Almost everything he had worked and lived for was gone. Almost.
The tributes that appeared following his death indicated that he remained in high esteem among colleagues internationally, because of his goodness, honesty, conscientiousness, and commitment to science.
A note to anyone who might consider reading this book. It’s difficult if not impossible to understand Max Planck without some grounding in his physics. Heilbron’s book stays away from any very heavy physics, but a lot of Planck’s work and that of his contemporaries is discussed at a qualitative level. This might not be to everyone’s taste. For me, a good deal of the value in the book is the use of Planck as a means to examine what is indicated by Heilbron’s subtitle: the fortunes of German science. Those fortunes went from being top of the heap during the second half of the nineteenth century, through the often difficult but unquestioned golden quarter century of quantum physics to 1925, and then to a pile of rubble that resembled what was left of Berlin in 1945.
My own assessment? Max Planck was in many ways an estimable person. He was a man who took part in all those delirious highs and bottomless lows while maintaining some sense of balance, direction, and perspective. Like Heisenberg, he was an accomplished pianist and had near perfect pitch. He had his own clear sense of religion, was well read, and like Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel he was well informed in philosophy, his rejection of positivism being a good indicator of his balanced outlook. Planck was a well-rounded individual, a product of a time that was in some ways enviable, and an excellent theoretical physicist, even if not considered a genius.
Trying to understand a person like this, and trying to understand his time, which ought to be a cautionary tale for everyone today, are decent objectives.
The title of the book is well chosen. Max Planck was at the forefront of those who formulated the new concepts that ushered in quantum physics and forced a reluctant rethink of views by some classical physicists. One might say that it was essentially Planck and Heisenberg who led the charge on this sea change, and that quantum physics was very much a product of the German-speaking world. This was one reason why Planck enjoyed such great esteem not only in Germany but throughout the international physics community. The other reason was that Planck was seen as truly a good, honest, and conscientious person. Hence the “upright” label.
In the book, Heilbron takes pains to discuss why Planck chose to remain in Germany when so many of his colleagues fled. And the number who fled were legion: Einstein, James Franck, Lise Meitner, Otto Frisch, Max Born, Richard Courant (a mathematician), and many more. As Heilbron puts it, the lush garden that was German physics abruptly turned into a desert. The famous German mathematician, David Hilbert, had much the same observation about how German mathematics was devastated by the same imposed changes. But Planck’s worldview was that German physics prospered for very specific reasons, and that it was a garden that needed careful tending. Planck saw himself as the gardener. So, when Hitler came to power, the problem Planck had to face was how to navigate through the mess that was Third Reich politics in order to maintain support and funding for German physics. Inevitably there were compromises, some of which were deemed by others to have been unacceptable. Hence the “dilemmas” label.
Taking a sympathetic view, both Planck and Heisenberg were faced by situations that offered unpleasant, even unpalatable choices. When viewed critically, the historical record of what these two men decided to do and why is ambiguous. Various people have chosen after the fact to judge the two men harshly; the judgments of others have been gentler. Heilbron’s judgment falls somewhere in between, definitely leaning toward a more generous conclusion, but not avoiding information that might be seen as damning. And without saying so explicitly, he indicates that given Planck’s personality and makeup, his expectation that what was worse in the Third Reich would not come to the worst but would improve, and his basic decision to remain in Germany, his situation was impossible. Before the fact, nobody could be confident of their own path if placed in Planck’s situation.
Heilbron ends the book in the following paragraph:
“And there is the dilemma of dilemmas. Few actions are mandated by categorical imperative. Moral behaviour is guided in practice by maxims derived from social experience and judged by its near and remote consequences. How and when should the reckoning be made? Did Planck take the best way with the Nazis by staying in office and preserving, as best he could, his clear conscience and good will? Did his worldview ennoble or betray him?”
At the end of an Afterword (dated 2000) to the book that takes into account information which emerged after the book’s first appearance in 1986, Heilbron writes as follows, beginning with a quote from Planck:
“ ’Whoever wants to know who I am I ask to read what I have written and printed.’ It is not enough. We must also know what he did in obedience to the things he wrote. What he did during the Nazi period was to act in accordance with a worldview that allowed him no escape from his situation with his honor intact. That was the saddest of his catastrophes. The answer to the question with which Dilemmas ends is that his worldview betrayed him.”
Max Planck died of a stroke on October 4 1947, at the age of 89. By that time he had suffered great personal tragedy. His eldest son Karl had died of wounds he received in battle. His two daughters both had died in childbirth. A granddaughter had died in an accident. His youngest son Erwin had been accused, probably falsely, of being complicit in the plot to assassinate Hitler. He had been cleared of that charge, but then Planck learned without warning that Erwin had been executed.
By then he was also destitute. In a fierce bombing raid on Berlin, a direct hit had been made on his house in the suburb of Grunewald. The house, along with all its contents, was destroyed completely. For a time Planck wandered homeless, and he spent some nights sleeping in haystacks.
Almost everything he had worked and lived for was gone. Almost.
The tributes that appeared following his death indicated that he remained in high esteem among colleagues internationally, because of his goodness, honesty, conscientiousness, and commitment to science.
A note to anyone who might consider reading this book. It’s difficult if not impossible to understand Max Planck without some grounding in his physics. Heilbron’s book stays away from any very heavy physics, but a lot of Planck’s work and that of his contemporaries is discussed at a qualitative level. This might not be to everyone’s taste. For me, a good deal of the value in the book is the use of Planck as a means to examine what is indicated by Heilbron’s subtitle: the fortunes of German science. Those fortunes went from being top of the heap during the second half of the nineteenth century, through the often difficult but unquestioned golden quarter century of quantum physics to 1925, and then to a pile of rubble that resembled what was left of Berlin in 1945.
My own assessment? Max Planck was in many ways an estimable person. He was a man who took part in all those delirious highs and bottomless lows while maintaining some sense of balance, direction, and perspective. Like Heisenberg, he was an accomplished pianist and had near perfect pitch. He had his own clear sense of religion, was well read, and like Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel he was well informed in philosophy, his rejection of positivism being a good indicator of his balanced outlook. Planck was a well-rounded individual, a product of a time that was in some ways enviable, and an excellent theoretical physicist, even if not considered a genius.
Trying to understand a person like this, and trying to understand his time, which ought to be a cautionary tale for everyone today, are decent objectives.
May 4, 2019
In the book, there is a picture of the professor; standing on a ladder in his floor-to-ceiling library, reading. A peaceful and dignified man, of a long line of German scholars and professors of theology and law, lauded for his scientific achievements. And yet, he was a modern day Job. Reviewing his life, you get the sense of propriety, dignity and the quiet conservatism of a 19th century gentleman who had chosen the quiet life of a scholar. He was a pleasant man. Einstein once recounted the proximity to Planck as one of the joys and attractions of Berlin. In the heady days of the 1920s they played music together and discussed the merits of theoretical and philosophical physics. Those were the annī mirabilis of not just Einstein, but a whole host of luminaries of German science and physics. Even after the end of the WWI, gathered in Berlin, under the quiet force of the dignified diminutive professor (who by now had lost his eldest son to the war and his eldest daughter to pregnancy) Germany's science community was a fount of rational objectivity, resisting the forces of positivism and the Copenhagen school of Niels Bohr.
But the failures of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis ended all that. The upright man who was so deeply invested in Germany took it upon himself to do his duty and tried, with limited success, to keep his haven, his ark as Heilbron calls it, intact in Berlin. He urged scientists, Jews and others, to stay and work within the system. Einstein left for the U.S. and renounced what was going on. The gentlemen in Berlin were forced not to even mention his name. Planck tried in little and always dignified ways to be subversive. He praised the theory of relativity, the Jewish Science, whenever he could (even in a lecture given to the Nazi officers' club,) he defeated and fended off some of the worst paranoid Nazi-sympathizers like Stark (of the Stark effect fame) hovering above his beloved Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute. But ultimately and slowly that ark was lost. During the war Heisenberg was trying (or not) to make a bomb in the Max-Plank institute for physics (established by a Rockefeller grant in 1938.)
Then came more tragedies. He took the loss of his villa, his library, papers and all his material possessions in the ally air raids on Berlin in strides. His daughter tried to commit suicide and his surviving son despite all the influence and dignity of his father was executed when he was implicated in the assassination attempt against Hitler. Bent over from physical pain (spinal fusion) the 89 year old dignified professor had to flee his country house, that had now become a battlefield, for the woods. He spent a night crying of pain on a haystack. Two years later, after the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute now destitute and scattered (part of it in Gottingen) was named after him (on the insistence of the British to get rid of the name of the maniac who started it all) he died of a stroke in 1947.
What is the price of tolerating evil? Of staying silent? Albert Einstein lived a long life in self-exile. There was really nothing for him left in Germany. Was it easy for him to denounce it all? Planck, staying behind, was dragged through the muck. He couldn't save Germany or himself. Not everyone can afford to leave turmoil. Many who couldn't or wouldn't ended up in unimaginable situations and still do. The dilemmas of upright people everywhere stay the same throughout the cycle of history.
But the failures of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazis ended all that. The upright man who was so deeply invested in Germany took it upon himself to do his duty and tried, with limited success, to keep his haven, his ark as Heilbron calls it, intact in Berlin. He urged scientists, Jews and others, to stay and work within the system. Einstein left for the U.S. and renounced what was going on. The gentlemen in Berlin were forced not to even mention his name. Planck tried in little and always dignified ways to be subversive. He praised the theory of relativity, the Jewish Science, whenever he could (even in a lecture given to the Nazi officers' club,) he defeated and fended off some of the worst paranoid Nazi-sympathizers like Stark (of the Stark effect fame) hovering above his beloved Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute. But ultimately and slowly that ark was lost. During the war Heisenberg was trying (or not) to make a bomb in the Max-Plank institute for physics (established by a Rockefeller grant in 1938.)
Then came more tragedies. He took the loss of his villa, his library, papers and all his material possessions in the ally air raids on Berlin in strides. His daughter tried to commit suicide and his surviving son despite all the influence and dignity of his father was executed when he was implicated in the assassination attempt against Hitler. Bent over from physical pain (spinal fusion) the 89 year old dignified professor had to flee his country house, that had now become a battlefield, for the woods. He spent a night crying of pain on a haystack. Two years later, after the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute now destitute and scattered (part of it in Gottingen) was named after him (on the insistence of the British to get rid of the name of the maniac who started it all) he died of a stroke in 1947.
What is the price of tolerating evil? Of staying silent? Albert Einstein lived a long life in self-exile. There was really nothing for him left in Germany. Was it easy for him to denounce it all? Planck, staying behind, was dragged through the muck. He couldn't save Germany or himself. Not everyone can afford to leave turmoil. Many who couldn't or wouldn't ended up in unimaginable situations and still do. The dilemmas of upright people everywhere stay the same throughout the cycle of history.
May 19, 2016
This quite a good book, but not exactly the book I expected. It isn't a general biography of Planck, nor a review of his scientific career. Rather, it is about Planck as administrator and as moral actor. He comes up very well in this account; as a hard-working, decent, wise, and fair person,
Planck was not merely an eminent theoretician, he had an incredible scope of authority over German physics. He had served as president or board member of pretty much every major society and institute: The University of Berlin, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the Berlin Academy, etc etc. His conduct in all these posts was praised uniformly for its probity and fairness.
I now understand much better why the major German research institutes are the "Max Planck Institutes". Planck, as leader of the KWI, went to a lot of effort to wrangle up the money for a pure physics institute. Peter Debye, the first president of the physics institute, named it after Planck. After the war, when there was pressure to change the KWI name, the authorities decided to name the whole system after Planck.
Planck managed to navigate the rather painful politics of the 20th century looking like an impressively decent person. He fought quietly, but with some success, to keep jews employed; after they left, he spoke up on behalf of their reputations in ways that were distressing to the Nazis -- he was marked in their files as politically suspect. His son was executed for plotting against Hitler.
Planck was philosophically minded, and had a number of sensible things to say about the meaning of science, and its relations with other aspects of human life.
In 1926 (before Heisenberg's work on the uncertainty principle) Planck offered the following ingenious argument to reconcile determinism with free will. Determinism says that given complete information about the past, we can predict the future. And of course, our actions are often predictable: we can often predict what others will do, and we can explain our past or future decisions. But we have free will, because when we deliberate, we alter our state of mind, making prediction impossible and insulating our subsequent state of mind from the known factors that went into it.
There are philosophical objections to this argument, but I was struck by two things: first, it has a distinct uncertainty principle flavor, despite being articulated before the Uncertainty Principle, and by a scientist who found Heisenberg's physics highly suspect philosophically.
Planck was not merely an eminent theoretician, he had an incredible scope of authority over German physics. He had served as president or board member of pretty much every major society and institute: The University of Berlin, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, the Berlin Academy, etc etc. His conduct in all these posts was praised uniformly for its probity and fairness.
I now understand much better why the major German research institutes are the "Max Planck Institutes". Planck, as leader of the KWI, went to a lot of effort to wrangle up the money for a pure physics institute. Peter Debye, the first president of the physics institute, named it after Planck. After the war, when there was pressure to change the KWI name, the authorities decided to name the whole system after Planck.
Planck managed to navigate the rather painful politics of the 20th century looking like an impressively decent person. He fought quietly, but with some success, to keep jews employed; after they left, he spoke up on behalf of their reputations in ways that were distressing to the Nazis -- he was marked in their files as politically suspect. His son was executed for plotting against Hitler.
Planck was philosophically minded, and had a number of sensible things to say about the meaning of science, and its relations with other aspects of human life.
In 1926 (before Heisenberg's work on the uncertainty principle) Planck offered the following ingenious argument to reconcile determinism with free will. Determinism says that given complete information about the past, we can predict the future. And of course, our actions are often predictable: we can often predict what others will do, and we can explain our past or future decisions. But we have free will, because when we deliberate, we alter our state of mind, making prediction impossible and insulating our subsequent state of mind from the known factors that went into it.
There are philosophical objections to this argument, but I was struck by two things: first, it has a distinct uncertainty principle flavor, despite being articulated before the Uncertainty Principle, and by a scientist who found Heisenberg's physics highly suspect philosophically.
March 7, 2024
Pretty dry. I find myself going back to read it a second time. My recommendation: start with the final chapter, which is the most interesting one (concerning Planck's presiding over German science during the Nazi regime). Also, the first chapter, about Planck's initial contribution to quantum theory, is pretty readable.
July 16, 2010
Review of Dilemmas of an Upright man: Max Planck - draft
{brief intro}
Max Plank (1858 – 1947) was an influential German physicist whose contributions to quantum mechanics helped launch a revolution in science between 1900 and 1930.
Using Boltzmann's statistical mechanics and the concept of energy quantization, Planck was the first person to explain a phenomenon of quantum theory (black-body radiation). This discovery helped him to come up with a new system of measurement. One such measure is called the Plank time (tP), which is a unit of time expressed by the system of natural units known as Planck units. The interval of time associated with this unit is twenty-six orders of magnitude smaller than the current limit of observation, the attosecond (10^26 Plank times).
The progress of dimensional analysis in physics suggests that a working theory of quantum gravity, wherein the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity would be made, will allow us to understand particle interactions occurring at time intervals associated with the Plank time. However, not a single person has been able to produce a Theory of Quantum Gravity whose predictions agree with experimental evidence. Up until his death in 1955, Einstein spent many years of his life working on this problem. A solution to this problem has proven to be so elusive and difficult, that it has been at the forefront of science for the past seven decades.
More speculative theories have called into existence quantum gravity "foam" where there are space-time fluctuations occurring on the Planck scale. This predicts that images of extremely distant objects, such as red-shifted galaxies and quasars, should be blurry. Although this prediction has not yet been proven by observation, which was shown by experiments conducted by the Hubble space telescope in 2003, these observations have lead to a debate about the physical implications of the Planck time as a physical minimum time interval. However, it was determined that "the cumulative effects of space-time fluctuations on the phase coherence of light [in certain theories of 'foamy' space-time:] are too small to be observable."
------
The main problem is that the mathematics of general relativity and quantum mechanics cease to cooperate when it comes to explaining each other’s properties. Efforts to describe gravity (what gives particles mass?) have proven particularly frustrating for both theories. For example, the gravitational and electrical force (phenomena which are magnetic in nature), differ in strength by about 39 orders of magnitude, with the latter being the stronger. This explains why the forces holding together the molecules of our bodies do not dissolve when subjected to the downward pull of earth's entire mass of approximately 5.9742 × 10^15 teragrams.
Without a Theory that unifies the concepts of general relativity and quantum mechanics, these observations cannot be explained. However, recent events suggest progress in this area. By smashing particles together at very high speeds (close to the speed of light), the 27 km, ~9 billion dollar CERN experiment (LHC) straddling the Franco-Swiss border has been actively involved in trying to unlock this mystery. The main goal of the scientists working there is to give us a more detailed description of quantum mechanics by recreating conditions that haven't been seen since the Big Bang-roughly 13.3 to 13.9 billion years ago. This would give us more clues about the origin of the universe, and might even allow us to construct real X-wing spacecraft, which has been the main goal of science all along.
August 31, 2014
A. Summary: This is the story of Max Planck (German), the father of quantum theory. In 1900 his reluctant discoveries began the era of modern physics. The years after this were spent shaping the institutions and philosophy of science. When the Third Reich took power his world view collapsed. Much of this book deals with Planck reconstructing this world view. Planck tried to do his duty for the fatherland, not the Fuhrer. Planck managed to ignore the Holocaust, and so did Heilbron.
B. Dilemma: His main dilemma was the cleansing of the Jewish professiorate. His worldview was one of unity. Intellectual life, social life, duty to the state, and moral imperatives were all of a piece. In an era in which state, science, and morality all went their separate ways what was Planck to do? Planck stayed in office and tried to preserve his good will. Einstein left for America.
C. Establishing the world picture (childhood to 1908)
1. His world picture was a unity encompassing all branches of his life. From his science, to administrative duties (reform at the university), liberalism (wanting women to attend university), music (conducting and performing on the piano), family (great happy moments spent with wife and 4 children), pedagogy (pleasure in teaching), Planck’s world view was complete
2. The scientific problem that eventually changed physics was Planck’s attempt to compute the tints (hot, white hot) inside a furnace for any temperature. If he could devise a formula to do this he would be able to rate electric lamps.
3. He strongly favored Einsteinian relativism. HS was the fist major scientist to be converted by Einstein and one of the main reasons Einstein was so accepted.
D. Defending the world picture (1908-14)
1. He first had to defend his world view against Mach. Mach was an anti-atomist and an empiricist. Planck regarded positivism as a danger.
2. In some senses this defending had to occur after the devastating death of his wife, the death of a son in war, and the death of his twin girls as they gave birth.
E. Doctor of science (1914-33)
1. This chapter deals with Planck becoming a “doctor” to cure the ills of science and technology during the Weimar Republic. These problems included anti-Semitism and anti-relativism. Planck emerges as the chief spokesman of German science...intent in keeping German culture at the top of all civilized nations.
2. Planck played doctor in three areas: the institutional scene of German science (setting up committees, physics institute etc.), international relations (his belief that science transcended politics and thus the worlds scientists should remain united), and anti-antirelativity (he fought against those anti-Semites in Germany who believed that relativity was the work of the Jews).
F. In shipwreck (1933-47)
1. Both of Planck’s positions in his professional life were dependent on the Reich for support.
B. Dilemma: His main dilemma was the cleansing of the Jewish professiorate. His worldview was one of unity. Intellectual life, social life, duty to the state, and moral imperatives were all of a piece. In an era in which state, science, and morality all went their separate ways what was Planck to do? Planck stayed in office and tried to preserve his good will. Einstein left for America.
C. Establishing the world picture (childhood to 1908)
1. His world picture was a unity encompassing all branches of his life. From his science, to administrative duties (reform at the university), liberalism (wanting women to attend university), music (conducting and performing on the piano), family (great happy moments spent with wife and 4 children), pedagogy (pleasure in teaching), Planck’s world view was complete
2. The scientific problem that eventually changed physics was Planck’s attempt to compute the tints (hot, white hot) inside a furnace for any temperature. If he could devise a formula to do this he would be able to rate electric lamps.
3. He strongly favored Einsteinian relativism. HS was the fist major scientist to be converted by Einstein and one of the main reasons Einstein was so accepted.
D. Defending the world picture (1908-14)
1. He first had to defend his world view against Mach. Mach was an anti-atomist and an empiricist. Planck regarded positivism as a danger.
2. In some senses this defending had to occur after the devastating death of his wife, the death of a son in war, and the death of his twin girls as they gave birth.
E. Doctor of science (1914-33)
1. This chapter deals with Planck becoming a “doctor” to cure the ills of science and technology during the Weimar Republic. These problems included anti-Semitism and anti-relativism. Planck emerges as the chief spokesman of German science...intent in keeping German culture at the top of all civilized nations.
2. Planck played doctor in three areas: the institutional scene of German science (setting up committees, physics institute etc.), international relations (his belief that science transcended politics and thus the worlds scientists should remain united), and anti-antirelativity (he fought against those anti-Semites in Germany who believed that relativity was the work of the Jews).
F. In shipwreck (1933-47)
1. Both of Planck’s positions in his professional life were dependent on the Reich for support.
March 20, 2011
Interesting. Also got me points with a physics major I met at the blood drive.
August 19, 2017
Interesting history but a bit of a dull read at times.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews