Max Planck
Max Planck
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, FRSwas a German theoretical physicist whose work on quantum theory won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 April 1858
CityKiel, Germany
CountryGermany
knowledge mean intuition
Science does not mean an idle resting upon a body of certain knowledge; it means unresting endeavor and continually progressing development toward an end which the poetic intuition may apprehend, but which the intellect can never fully grasp.
hands would-be pockets
Scientific work will never stop, and it would be terrible if it did. If there were no more problems, you would put your hands in your pockets and your head on a pillow and would work no more. In science rest is stagnation, rest is death.
art creative atheism
The history of all times and nations teaches us that exactly in the naïve, unshakable belief, furnished by religion in active life of believers, originate the most intense motives for the most significant creative performance, not only in the field of arts and sciences but also in politics.
errors progress generations
Science progresses not by convincing the adherents of old theories that they are wrong, but by allowing enough time to pass so that a new generation can arise unencumbered by the old errors.
fighting rallying-cry battle
Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never-relaxing crusade against skepticism and dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and will always be, 'On to God.'
mean law self
What led me to my science and what fascinated me from a young age was the, by no means self-evident, fact that our laws of thought agree with the regularities found in the succession of impressions we receive from the external world, that it is thus possible for the human being to gain enlightenment regarding these regularities by means of pure thought
mean imagination experiments
Experiment is the only means of knowledge at our disposal. Everything else is poetry, imagination.
teacher dust theoretical-physics
When I began my physical studies [in Munich in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly...he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science...Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but the system as a whole stood there fairly secured, and theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries.
struggle hard-work decay
We cannot rest and sit down lest we rust and decay. Health is maintained only through work. And as it is with all life so it is with science. We are always struggling from the relative to the absolute.
religious soul religion
It was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls.
taken acceptance research
Hitherto the principle of causality was universally accepted as an indispensable postulate of scientific research, but now we are told by some physicists that it must be thrown overboard. The fact that such an extraordinary opinion should be expressed in responsible scientific quarters is widely taken to be significant of the all-round unreliability of human knowledge. This indeed is a very serious situation.
light velocity action
The Theory of Relativity confers an absolute meaning on a magnitude which in classical theory has only a relative significance: the velocity of light. The velocity of light is to the Theory of Relativity as the elementary quantum of action is to the Quantum Theory: it is its absolute core.
science tasks absolutes
I had always looked upon the search for the absolute as the noblest and most worth while task of science.
ideas scientist unlikely
Those [scientists] who dislike entertaining contradictory thoughts are unlikely to enrich their science with new ideas.