Max Planck
1858 - 1947
BY: Rachel L. Torres
&
Elizabeth Esparza
History of Max Planck
• Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born in Kiel,
Germany, on April 23, 1858, the son of Julius
Wilhelm and Emma.
• Planck studied at the Universities of Munich and
Berlin, where his teachers included Kirchhoff and
Helmholtz, and received his doctorate of philosophy
at Munich in 1879.
His Family:)
• He also came from an academic family, and his
father Julius Wilhelm Planck being professor
of Constitutional Law in the University of Kiel
at the time of his birth, and both his grandpa
and his great-grandfather had been professor
of the theology at Göttingen.
• He was also born in a large family, being his
father’s 6th child.
Schools
• In July 1874, at the age of 16, he passed his school
leaving examination with distinction but, having
talents for a wide variety of subjects particularly
music he still did not have a clear idea of what he
should to study at university.
• He entered the University of Munich on 21 October
1874 and was taught physics by Philipp von Jolly and
Wilhelm Beetz.
Invention!!
• Max Planck is regarded as the founder of the quantum
theory!!
• In 1900 Max Planck made a profound discovery in modern
physics / Quantum Theory. He showed that light must be
emitted and absorbed in discrete amounts if it was to
correctly describe observed phenomena
Prior.
• Then light had been considered as a continuous
electromagnetic wave, thus the discrete nature of light was
completely unexpected, as Albert Einstein explains
Max Planck death:/
• He suffered a personal tragedy when one of them
was executed for his part in an unsuccessful
attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1944.
• Planck was 87 years old at the end of World War
II and he was taken to Göttingen by the allies.
Remarkably, given his age, he was able to put
effort into reconstructing German science
• Later, MAX died at Göttingen on
October 4, 1947