- When we think about the
historical contribution
of Max Planck, we usually
think about how he invented
the whole idea of quantum energy in 1900.
But we often ignore how Max
Planck was at the center
of the wild revolution
in physics in the 1920s.
He often financially supported,
and sometimes morally supported,
and sometimes restrained the work
of Albert Einstein, Werner
Heisenberg, Max Born,
Lise Meitner, James Frank,
Erwin Schrodinger and more.
Way, way more.
I contend that all of
this happened in the 1920s
because of Max Planck's
political actions in World War I,
and his personal tragedies
around the same time,
which made him a pariah
in international circles,
and truly beloved and
powerful in German circles.
Ready for the story?
Let's go.
♪ Electricity, electricity ♪
♪ Electricity, electricity ♪
When World War I started,
Max Planck was 56 years old
and the father of four children,
from his first wife Maria,
who died from tuberculosis
five years earlier.
26 year old Karl, 25 year
old twins, Emma and Grete,
and 21 year old Erwin, and
his second wife, Marga,
was pregnant with his fifth child.
Max Planck was admired
and respected by almost
everyone who knew him.
For example, the physicist Lise Meitner,
who had traveled to Berlin
in 1907 specifically
to study under Planck, and
became his assistant in 1913,
said that Planck, quote:
was such a wonderful person
that when he entered the room,
the air of the room got better.
Also, before the start of the war in 1913,
Max Planck was instrumental
in getting 35 year old Albert Einstein
a position in Berlin, working
to create a new section
of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
for Theoretical Physics,
just for Einstein.
Einstein was happy about the move,
because it meant working near Planck,
being near his girlfriend/cousin, Elsa,
and living near his very
good friend, the chemist,
Fritz Haber.
Once in Berlin, Einstein,
Planck, and Haber
all became very close.
Surprisingly, this
closeness between Einstein,
Planck, and Haber, did not diminish
with the outbreak of World War I.
I say it was surprising because Planck,
like almost all of his German compatriots,
welcomed the outbreak of World War I.
And was pleased that
his two sons volunteered
for the military and his
daughters joined the Red Cross.
Planck wrote his sister:
what a glorious time
we are living in; it is a
great feeling to be able
to call oneself a German.
Fritz Haber was even more
moved by patriotic fervor,
and immediately turned to
using his chemical expertise
from the development
of nitrogen fertilizer,
which saved millions of
lives, to the production
of munitions, and then became the father
of chemical weapons, with
the invention and deployment
of chlorine gas.
Einstein, on the other hand,
was actively against the war,
and very upset with this
madness taking over his friends,
and his workplace.
It wasn't long into the war when reports
that Germany had violated a
treaty by attacking Belgium,
killing, raping, and enslaving
thousands, reached Berlin.
However, Planck and other
German intellectuals
thought it was propaganda,
and in September of 1914,
Planck and Haber added their names
to a long list of prominent scientists
that denied Germany started the war,
or even caused the harm
to the life and property
of a single Belgian citizen,
except out of self-defense.
Einstein was disgusted, and
was not only one of the few
prominent scientists not
to sign the manifesto,
but also co-wrote a rebuttal.
The pro-war letter that
Planck signed was published
with a feeling of great
patriotic acclaim in Germany,
but it also created great disgust
and revulsion among the Allies.
Soon, Planck's Dutch
friend, Hendrik Lorentz,
who he met at the first Solvey Conference,
started sending him
accounts of the terrors
of the German occupation.
Planck started to admit things
were happening that do not,
quote: conduce to the honor of Germans.
By 1916, Planck wrote an
open letter to Lorentz,
slightly backtracking
on his previous signing
of the declaration, saying that he, quote:
noticed with distress that it gave rise
to incorrect ideas about
the feelings of its signers.
That same year, Planck's
feelings about the war
became more personal.
His younger adult son Erwin
was captured by the French,
and his older son Karl
was killed in action.
And Planck tried to focus on
his teaching and research,
but it wasn't easy; the
winter of 1916, 1917,
was particularly brutal, and a student
named Gabriele Rabel recalled:
we were without coal.
Indeed, some universities had
completely closed their doors,
but in Berlin, teachers and
students kept on their overcoats
and plodded ahead.
Each day, Planck made a little speech,
encouraging us to endure.
When Planck once asked
if he should delay class
for the weather, he was overjoyed to learn
that his students wanted to
keep on going, no matter what.
Planck's happiness and
pride at our devotion,
and the childlike candor with
which he expressed his joy,
was overwhelming, and
whatever hearts had not
flown to him before were conquered now.
Then, tragedy struck again.
In May of 1917, Planck's daughter,
Grete, died in childbirth
to a daughter they called
Grete in her honor.
Planck was devastated.
He wrote Einstein, quote: I must tell you
that I still feel physically
incapable of work these days.
My grief over my daughter,
who passed away in my arms
last week, still gnaws too
persistently at my thoughts
for them to be able to exert
their normal freedom of action.
In February of 1918, to
improve Planck's mood,
Einstein arranged a big
birthday celebration
for Planck's birthday in April.
Quote: because I'm very fond of Planck,
and he will certainly
be pleased when he sees
how much we all like him,
and how highly everyone
regards his life work.
Planck enjoyed the celebration,
but the good feeling didn't last long,
because in November of that year, 1918,
Germany lost the war.
And Germany was thrust into
chaos and economic free-fall.
Although Planck's younger son Erwin
was released from captivity.
Then, more tragedy.
I know!
In November of the following year, 1919,
Planck's other daughter, Emma,
who had moved in with her brother in law,
to take care of her orphan niece,
and fell in love with her
brother in law, got married,
she died in childbirth.
Einstein said that, quote: I
could not hold back my tears
when I visited Planck; his
aching pain shows through.
Planck wrote Lorentz: now I
mourn both my dearly beloved
children in bitter sorry, and
feel robbed and impoverished.
There have been times when
I doubted the value of life, itself.
Despite the personal
tragedy going on around him,
Planck's professional
life was at its pinnacle.
Because just as he was finding out
about his second daughter's death,
he also learned that he was
awarded the 1918 Nobel Prize.
They gave the award a year late,
for his discovery of energy quanta.
Planck's birthday celebration
is considered a big part
of the reason that Planck
was finally receiving
the recognition he deserved,
and one physicist, Arnold Summerfield,
actually re-used his speech
for the birthday party
in his recommendation for a Nobel Prize.
Fritz Haber went with Planck
to Sweden that same year,
as he won the Nobel Prize for chemistry
for his production of nitrogen fertilizer,
causing mass protests and a melding
of Planck's accomplishments with Haber's
chemical weapons in many people's minds.
The immediate post-war
years were very hard.
There were food shortages,
transit strikes,
riots, and an inflation out of control.
In addition, all German scientists,
with the exception of Einstein,
were hated by the international community.
For signing the manifesto,
and for facilitating chemical warfare.
For example, Einstein was
the only german scientist
to be invited to the Solvey
Conference of 1921 and 1924.
He didn't go out of solidarity.
Knowing how much they
were struggling in 1920,
Planck got together with Fritz Haber
and created an emergency
association of German science
to collect money from
industry and government,
and keep German science afloat.
Planck made sure a significant portion
of the money went to
theoretical research in physics.
Even though industry and government
saw very little use for it at the time.
Because two well-known,
Nobel Prize winners were
collecting money, and one of
them was arguably history's
most influential chemist,
they're pretty successful.
One of Planck's and Haber's first acts
was inviting the Danish man, Niels Bohr,
to a talk in Berlin in April of 1920.
Bohr was too excited about
the opportunity of meeting
Planck and Einstein to refuse.
And he ended up forming
many close friendships.
Bohr called his
conversations with Einstein
the greatest experience he ever had.
The Germans were overjoyed
with Bohr's visit,
and a scientist named
George de Hevesy recalled
that he had never experienced
an ovation similar
to that given to Bohr in Berlin.
Young and old celebrated
him with complete conviction
and enthusiasm.
Lise Meitner felt a little
jealous about all the professors
dominating Bohr's time,
so she asked Planck
if she could have an
afternoon without big-wigs,
and he agreed.
It was at this luncheon,
where Bohr became very close
to many up and coming scientists,
including James Frank.
I mention Frank in particular,
because in November of 1920,
Frank became a professor at
the University of Gottingen.
At the request of his friend, Max Born,
who was just made the chair.
And soon there was a
revolving door of students,
visitors, and ideas between
the scientists at Gottingen
and Bohr's newly-formed
Institute of Theoretical Physics
in Copenhagen, now called
The Niels Bohr Institute.
Meanwhile, Albert Einstein's
life was changing drastically,
with major implications not just for him,
but for the entire world.
See, a few months before Max Planck's
second daughter's death, in May of 1919,
an English scientist
named Arthur Eddington
photographed an eclipse
and proved that the stars
near the sun were deviated from their path
by the mass of the sun,
just as Einstein predicted
by general relativity.
The papers went crazy, and soon Einstein
was the most famous
scientist in the world.
The burgeoning Nazi
movement started to focus
on Einstein, because he was
a pacifist, he was Jewish,
and he was helped by an English scientist.
A trifecta of things
that Nazis did not like.
In August of 1920, a
Nazi named Paul Weyland
announced the series of 20
lectures against relativity.
Quote: for the preservation
of pure science.
When Planck heard about
this, he called it:
scarcely believable filth.
But was surprised to
learn that there were many
legitimate scientists who
objected to relativity,
led by the Nobel Prize winners,
Philipp Lenard,
and Johannes Stark.
Planck, who was the first
scientist to promote
Einstein's relativity, way back in 1905,
decided to host a debate
between Lenard and Einstein,
in September of 1920.
Planck ensured that this
happened without drama,
but he also did not seem
to change anyone's mind.
Einstein flirted heavily
with leaving Germany,
and was given many offers,
but he didn't accept them
out of a desire no to disappoint Planck.
In 1922, Einstein accepted the Nobel Prize
awarded for the previous year,
and Planck limited Einstein's
duties to a bare minimum.
One lecture a year to keep him in Berlin.
Which did nothing to
squash the anti-Einstein,
anti-relativity, antisemitic faction.
By 1924, Lenard and Stark were publishing
a public manifesto
proclaiming their devotion
to Hitler as a, quote:
gift to God from a long,
darkened earlier time,
when races were sill pure.
Bleh!
Meanwhile, Planck was still supporting
theoretical physicists in Germany,
irrespective of whether
they were Jewish or not.
For example, in 1921,
Planck began the process
to have Lise Meitner become
a paid instructor of physics
in Berlin, leading to her becoming
the first female professor in Germany.
Within a year, she
discovered the Auger effect,
which is named after the
French, male scientist,
who discovered it after her.
Planck also financially supported Max Born
and James Frank at the
University of Gottingen.
Fun fact:
Max Born coined the term
"quantum mechanics" in 1924.
Anyway, in 1922, Born and
Frank invited Niels Bohr
to give a series of
lectures, and a 21 year old
wunderkind named Werner
Heisenberg went and was inspired.
Three years later, in 1925, Heisenberg
was Max Born's assistant,
and he came up with this idea
of using matrix mathematics
to describe how electrons behave.
Heisenberg went to Born and
told him that he'd written a,
quote/unquote: crazy paper.
And he didn't dare send it in
for publication on his own.
Luckily, Born was incredibly impressed.
And Max Born, Werner Heisenberg,
and a fellow scientist
named Pascual Jordan
published a series of
papers that arguably marked
the beginning of modern equations
and theories of quantum mechanics.
Planck gloated: quantum mechanics
is the center of interest
in all countries, and
just there in the work
of Heisenberg and Born, which
the committee has supported,
it is clear how useful the
committee has already been
for the development of physics in Germany.
At almost the same time,
an Austrian scientist
named Erwin Schrodinger
created a wave equation
for quantum mechanics.
Planck wrote Schrodinger, quote:
I'm reading your paper as
an excited child listens
to the answer to a riddle
that has long perplexed it.
Heisenberg, however, was not a fan.
He called his paper disgusting,
and worried that his matrix
theory would be discarded
for Schrodinger's far easier wave theory.
In 1926, Heisenberg went to Copenhagen
to study with Niels Bohr.
There, in February of 1927,
while trying to create
a quantum theory without
waves or particles,
Heisenberg ended up realizing the position
and momentum, mass
times speed, are linked.
And that the more precisely
you measure one property,
the less accurately you can
measure the other property,
in what is called: the
uncertainty principle.
Planck and Schrodinger
and Einstein and others,
hated the uncertainty principle,
which Planck called the ominous
relation of Heisenberg's.
Planck stated that Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle
creates, quote: an unacceptable limitation
of the freedom of
thought, and a mutilation
of the main instrument with
which the theorist must work.
Around this time, the
Solvey Committee decided
there are too many exciting
ideas coming out of Germany,
and they remove their anti-German embargo.
And most other conferences followed suit.
Also in 1927, Planck invited
Schrodinger to Berlin,
and for the next five
years, the Berlin view
of quantum mechanics, led by Schrodinger
and supported by Einstein
and Planck and more,
was in direct debate
with the Copenhagen view,
led by Heisenberg and supported
by Bohr and Born, and more.
Despite his dislike of
the uncertainty principle,
Planck continued to mentor and
support Heisenberg and Born
and many other people who
followed the Copenhagen view.
However, soon outside
politics would take over.
And destroy everything
that Planck held dear.
And that story is next time
on The Lightning Tamers.
Whew, so that was my
second part out of three
of my biography of Max Planck.
I really do find him fascinating
and I hope you do as well.
Please, if you haven't
checked out the first video,
you should definitely check it out,
and if you're interested
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Anyway, have a good day; thanks!
I'm gonna go with: Gottingen.
And it's gonna be wrong.
And then I'm gonna have to apologize.
