Planck
Driven by Vision, Broken by War
-
- $62.99
-
- $62.99
Publisher Description
Max Planck is credited with being the father of quantum theory, and his work was described by his close friend Albert Einstein as "the basis of all twentieth-century physics." But Planck's story is not well known, especially in the United States. A German physicist working during the first half of the twentieth century, his library, personal journals, notebooks, and letters were all destroyed with his home in World War II. What remains, other than his contributions to science, are handwritten letters in German shorthand, and tributes from other scientists of the time.
In Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War, Brandon R. Brown interweaves the voices and writings of Planck, his family, and his contemporaries--with many passages appearing in English for the first time--to create a portrait of a groundbreaking physicist working in the midst of war. Planck spent much of his adult life grappling with the identity crisis of being an influential German with ideas that ran counter to his government. During the later part of his life, he survived bombings and battlefields, surgeries and blood transfusions, all the while performing his influential work amidst a violent and crumbling Nazi bureaucracy. When his son was accused of treason, Planck tried to use his standing as a German "national treasure," and wrote directly to Hitler to spare his son's life. Brown tells the story of Planck's friendship with the far more outspoken Albert Einstein, and shows how his work fits within the explosion of technology and science that occurred during his life.
This story of a brilliant man living in a dangerous time gives Max Planck his rightful place in the history of science, and it shows how war-torn Germany deeply impacted his life and work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Max Planck (1858 1947) was Germany's most influential scientist at a time when German science led the world. Brown, a professor of physics at the University of San Francisco, combines the story of Planck's lucid, thoughtful life with that of physics' golden age. In 1900, Planck a 42-year-old middle-class Prussian professor, respected though not considered a prodigy solved a major problem in physics. Researchers assumed that radiation emitted from any object increases smoothly with temperature, but their equations never worked. The equation Planck developed worked beautifully, yet it assumed that radiation emerged in discrete clumps. This made no sense according to classical physics and marked the beginning of the quantum revolution. Brown emphasizes that while Planck remained conservative in character, he possessed the rare quality of never allowing prejudice to overrule facts. He quickly recognized Einstein's brilliance and, despite being as sexist as his colleagues, he forced them to accept Lise Meitner, an Austrian Jew who became the University of Berlin's first female science professor. Planck quietly defied Nazi racial laws, but eventually and against his will complied with orders to fire Jewish scientists. Planck had his flaws, but readers of this engrossing, insightful, and definitive biography will share Brown's admiration and agree that he deserves his iconic reputation.
