Max PlanckBorn 23 Apr 1858; died 4 Oct 1947 at age 89. Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was a German theoretical physicist who studied at Munich and Berlin, where he studied under Helmholtz, Clausius and Kirchhoff and subsequently joined the faculty. He became professor of theoretical physics (1889-1926). His work on the law of thermodynamics and the distribution of radiation from a black body led him to abandon classical Newtonian principles and introduce the quantum theory (1900), for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. This assumes that energy is not infinitely subdivisible, but ultimately exists as discrete amounts he called quanta (Latin, “how much”). Further, the energy carried by a quantum depends in direct proportion to the frequency of its source radiation. |
