Max Planck

Max Planck was the German physicist whose solution to the problem of black-body radiation in 1900 introduced the quantum, energy in discrete packets, and began the revolution he spent the rest of his life uneasy about. He was the senior figure of German science for forty years, president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, and stayed through the Nazi period, protesting Jewish colleagues’ dismissal to Hitler’s face; his son was executed for the plot against Hitler in 1945. Where Is Science Going? and the Scientific Autobiography are the reflections of a conservative man who overturned physics.